


Taetrus Trash

by anonymous_moose



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Film Noir, Gen, Gritty, Terrorism, Turians
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-13
Updated: 2013-04-28
Packaged: 2017-11-18 13:48:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 15
Words: 42,096
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/561728
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anonymous_moose/pseuds/anonymous_moose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Thirty years after the war, an old turian returns to a home that isn't home on a planet he always hated. He doesn't know why. Post-ME3, original cast.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Welcome Home

Truth is, I didn’t know why I was there at all.

I stepped out of the docking arm attached to the ship and into the port, took a deep breath of Vallum’s stale air, and wished like hell I had a cigarette.

Of course I hadn’t been allowed to keep them. Thirty years and two wars and customs was still as tight on Taetrus as it ever was. Figured I could get a pack when I landed, but it had been far too long and my palms were itching.

The crowd of the port was filled with the usual types - mostly turian, with a few asari, some volus, and a handful of krogan towering above the rest. No humans, no quarians. No one who had anywhere else to go came to Taetrus. Why would they? It’s off the main traffic lanes. Its major exports are cheap metals, manufacturing, and sleaze, and if you wanted any of the above, they were nicer places to get it. Like Omega, or Illium. At least Omega was honest about itself, and Illium was cleaner.

Not that I cared. I wasn’t here looking for work, or money. I had plenty of both. It wasn’t family. I didn’t have any left. It wasn’t even homesickness. I grew up in the north, in the more temperate climes. I’d only done a few years of a tour in the capital, working the bomb squad.

All the places I could have picked for a vacation, and the first thought I had, the one that wouldn’t let go, was Taetrus.

But I didn’t dwell on it at the time. I was too desperate for a smoke and too jetlagged from the trip. Sun was nearly set and I needed to find a bar. I stuck my hands in the pockets of my jacket and marched through the crowd.

Taetran markings were on nearly every face, in every color. Simple lines and hard angles. The marks on the jaw and mandible let you know who was from which continent, which region, and which city. Most were from the capital, on the western continent. A few northerners, like me, with a pair of marks along the mandibles. Even a few from out east, Eluria and the Diluvian Wildlands.

They let you size someone up. In the port, if you were from Taetrus, no one gave you a second glance. Even a scarred up old man with a broken fringe didn’t merit examination. It was the off-worlders who got stared at. The ones from Palaven, or Thessia, or Irune. They got looks. What do they think they’re doing, coming here? Taetrus is for Taetrans. That’s all there was to it.

Once you got out of the port, though, that’s when even the vaguest sense of unity disappeared. Because when you were walking the broken sidewalks and dirty streets of the capital, if you had the wrong colors or the wrong markings and you took a wrong turn down the wrong alley, you could be in a whole galaxy of trouble.

Taetrus was a black hole. You stayed here long enough, it sucked you in and you never got out.

If I knew what I was walking into… hell, I probably would have kept walking anyway. I’ve always been stubborn. Maybe that’s why I was there. Felt like I owed that place. Or maybe I felt like I deserved whatever was coming.

I didn’t really know. Still don’t.

But I suppose it doesn’t matter, does it?

* * *

 

The port was new, same way a lot of the city was new. A major terrorist attack followed by a galactic war meant that there wasn’t much left that was immediately recognizable.

But when I stepped out onto the street, it felt like nothing had changed. There were still street vendors hocking their wares to the offworlders, old-model public shuttles, licensed and unlicensed skycabs jockeying for position, and the familiar stinging scent of engine exhaust dulled by recent rainfall.

I didn’t pause to admire the view. The skyline had changed too much, and it never interested me anyway. Just big, grey buildings against a big, grey sky. I kept walking, past the vendors who ignored me in favor of asari or volus, past the cabbies who tried to encourage me to hitch a ride, past the public shuttles which were already filled to capacity, and down the main thoroughfare.

Vallum tried to fool you into thinking it was a prosperous, well-behaved city. Take a walk for a while, though, and the pretense gives way. Clean paths and storefronts turn to broken concrete and dirty glass. Tags from local gangs start appearing, growing larger the further you get from the starport. I didn’t recognize any of them. Turf changed with the tides, and the gangs themselves with the seasons.

I didn’t really have a destination in mind until I hit a corner and realized I was close to Nid’s. Figured stopping in for a drink wouldn’t hurt. And if nothing else, he’d have a beaten up old cigarette machine I could use.

It took me another ten minutes to get there, and by then, the sun had set in earnest. Alleyways darkened, and I kept my eyes forward as I walked. I wasn’t from Vallum, but I had Taetran markings and a nasty scar. That would keep all but the most desperate or stupid off my back, and I wasn’t in the mood for any trouble.

When I caught sight of Nid’s, I almost laughed. Vallum had been leveled twice in the last thirty years, and somehow that place hadn’t changed one iota. The window was still so dirty it looked frosted, the paint was still peeling in all the same places, and the ‘S’ in the static holosign still flickered at exactly the same rate. Stepping inside, the feeling was even stronger - the place was nearly empty, but for a handful of sleeping drunks and the usual suspicious types talking quietly in booths in the back. And there was Nid himself, standing behind the bar, cleaning a glass and looking as large as life. He glanced up at me as I entered, stared for a moment, then returned to his glass.

No one knew his exact age, but I guessed him in his fifties last time I saw him. Apparently I was wrong, or the old man aged gracefully, because apart from some growing thickness around his shoulders and waist, dulling of his already grey plates, and the tip of one finger missing, he looked exactly as I remembered. Big, tall, and barefaced, with long, low-hanging mandibles. The guy looked like the villain in a old vid, like General Ord or Targ the Tyrant.

Back when I worked the Boom Patrol, this was a popular place among the bomb techs, and there was all kinds of speculation on what Nid’s story was. Some said he was an old, washed-up actor. Others said he used to be military, broke protocol in a big way and had to do hard time. A long-running theory had it that he was a big shot in the local syndicates, and this was his quiet retirement. Nid never confirmed or denied anything. He never said much at all. When I left, the pool to make him laugh was up to three thousand credits. I wondered if anyone had ever collected.

But I had other concerns at the moment. I headed for the corner and the old vendor that sold tobacco. I took down the ‘OUT OF ORDER’ sign that looked like it had been taped there since the war, took out a credit chit, shoved it into the slot, and punched in the number for my brand.

The machine thudded and whirred, then went silent. ‘RESTOCK,’ it prompted on its LED screen.

I kicked it once, hard. When that didn’t work, I sighed and put in the numbers for another brand, some asari cloves. The vendor thudded, whirred, then clanged and banged and a small pack of cigarettes fell into the tray. I set to opening them, trying to ignore the layer of dust on the plastic wrap, and lit up as I headed for the bar.

I sidled up and took a seat on one of the stools. “The usual.”

He looked up. For a second I thought he didn’t recognize me, or if he did he wouldn’t remember, but then he turned around, reached for the bottle of Epyrus brandy, poured two fingers into a glass, neat, and set it in front of me.

This time I did laugh, quietly. Nid went back to cleaning his glass, paying no attention. I thought about being funny, asking him ‘what’s new,’ but I didn’t. I wasn’t feeling particularly conversational. I was feeling much at all, come to think of it.

I was finished with my drink and ordering another when she walked in. I checked her reflection in the stained mirror over the bar. Silver skin and shiny plates with forest green Taetran markings, with a second mark on her chin that said she was from Eluria, probably the Wildlands. Short fringe accented with numerous bright green feathers, flowing backward in the typical style. Yellow clothes, tight and hugging her waist, with a red shawl tied and draped across her chest and over one shoulder. She was young, no more than thirty, and pretty in a done up sort of way.

She took a seat at the end of the bar, furthest from the door, and tapped her fingers twice on the surface. Nid went over, pulled out a bottle of almost-decent wine, and poured her a glass. Figured she must have gotten stood up for something, because no one dresses that well to drink alone, and the expression on her face said she clearly wasn’t looking for any company.

That was fine with me. I was too busy trying not to wonder what I was doing there to care about her problems.

By the time I finished my second drink and was starting to feel a pleasant buzz behind my eyes, a group of noisy boys entered the bar, waking the sleepers and drawing irritated glances from the half-cut patrons in the back. They all had bright colorful Vallum markings and were dressed in local militia uniforms. The oldest couldn’t be more than twenty one, the youngest something like eighteen. They were celebrating something. Some kind of promotion. Or maybe one just got laid.

The four of them piled into a booth, slapping each other on the back and making entirely too much noise. I decided this third drink would be my last, and then I’d head out. Find a hotel or something nearby. Didn’t matter what, so long as it had a clean bed and bathroom.

I tapped the bar, and Nid added another three fingers to my near-empty glass. He kept looking at the militia boys and frowning. I glanced over at the woman at the end of the bar. She was pretending not to notice our new arrivals.

After a moment of hushed murmuring and stifled laughs, one of the four pushed himself up from their booth and headed over to the bar. “Four Spaedar ales for me and my friends,” he said loudly. “Extra pale.”

Nid stared at him before he moved to the back to pull them out of the refrigeration unit. The boy tapped his fingers on the bar, down at the girl, and sidled over closer.

I already knew where this was going. I took a sip of my drink and settled in to enjoy the show.

“What’s a nice girl like you doing in a dive like this?” he asked her.

I bit back a groan and rolled my eyes. Children.

The woman stared straight ahead, into the mirror above the bar. “Drinking,” she said, mandibles twitching.

The boy laughed, a little nervously. “Yeah, uh. I can see. You mind if I buy you a round?” He puffed up a little. “I just got promoted. In the-“

“The militia,” she finished. “I know.”

He blinked stupidly, already a little drunk. Probably kicked out of an earlier bar. He opened his mouth to speak and she cut him off.

“If I wanted to fuck a militiaman, I’d aim a little higher than a petty officer,” she said calmly, turning to look at him for the first time. “But to be honest? I’d rather fuck a volus.”

He gaped. She didn’t look away, and kept staring until Nid returned with his ales. While the boy gathered them up and retreated to his booth, she returned to staring at her reflection in the mirror.

Nid glanced reprovingly at her. Personally, I thought she was alright.

The boy returned to his compatriots with the drinks and at first they laughed at him, but as he whispered, their humor disappeared. They started throwing ugly looks at the woman at the bar. Nid started polishing the surface with a rag right above where he kept that old snub shotgun I’d seen him use to end fights and chase out troublemakers.

It was right around then that I finished my drink, and I was glad to be leaving. I stubbed out my cigarette in a cheap plastic ashtray, threw down a credit chit worth twice what I’d drank and walked out, hands in my pockets and pointedly not looking back.

I crossed the street as a single skycab flew overhead. You couldn’t see the stars in the city, but the twin rocky moons of Taetrus lingered overhead, one a crescent, the other full. They lit up the streets where the lamps were out, and I started walking slowly down the cracked sidewalk while I considered my options. There was a decent apartment complex a couple miles south of here. Figured I could rent something furnished if I paid for a month or two up front. I didn’t intend to stay that long, but then, I didn’t really intend to come here in the first place.

I turned around and started south, opposite where I’d been heading. The door to Nid’s opened in front of me and the woman stepped out and started walking the same direction, on the opposite side of the street. After about a half mile, I heard Nid’s door open again. I knew who it was, but I still glanced over my shoulder.

The boys from the bar were heading her way. Moving with purpose.

I turned away and kept walking. Ahead and to my left, the woman quickened her pace.

Another half mile and the boys had almost caught up to her. They were saying things like “Wildland bitch” and “fucking Facinus.” I saw her stick a hand in a pocket and pull out something that might have been a knife. Then she stepped decisively into an alley.

I kept walking. The boys ducked in after her. I kept walking. I heard the beginnings of a fight, cloth tearing and yelps of pain that were definitely male. I kept walking.

Not your problem, I told myself. Just another awful thing happening in an awful town on an awful planet. She can handle herself. You’re not a cop anymore. You stop for every beating or mugging and you’ll never make it to the hotel.

I was parallel with the alley. My pace slowed. Just keep walking.

One of the boys shouted, “Hold her!” and despite all my better judgment, I turned and looked. Saw three of them struggling in a heap on the other side of a dumpster, with the one she had insulted standing above. He was undoing his pants.

I was halfway across the street before I even knew what I was doing.

The boy started to crouch down behind the dumpster as I got up behind him. I grabbed one hand on his fringe and the other around his throat and heaved. He flew across the alley and knocked over a few broken-down recyclers. One of the other three let go of the woman’s leg and threw a wild punch in my direction. I ducked left and let him run into my knee, which sent him crumpling to the ground.

One of the other two smashed the woman in the face with his fist. She was already bleeding from the nose, he was just making sure she’d stay down. The other rose, tried to tackle me. I managed to stay upright, wrapping one arm between his neck and cowl and squeezing. That’s when the one I threw smashed me across the back of the head with something. Probably a piece of one of the recyclers. I fell on top of the one beneath me, who threw me off and clutched weakly at his throat.

I rolled and one kicked me in the side. I kept rolling, coming up long enough to barely catch one punch in an open hand, but not the other. Pain shot through my ribs and I cringed, then spun and pulled his arm and flung the boy away from me. He staggered, lost his balance in a puddle and fell.

I spun back and found a gun in my face. Newer model Aquitus, standard issue small caliber pistol for state police and militias. The turian holding it, the rapist, snarled while one of friends came up his side. The fourth held a small blade to the woman’s throat. Maybe the same one she’d had earlier.

“Van,” the other said, “calm down-“

“Fucking Facinus,” the rapist said, spitting out the word through heavy breaths. “Women and old men, think they can treat us like dirt. They don’t own Vallum!”

“Van-“

“Put the gun down, boy, or I put you down,” I said, a lot more confidently than I felt.

He laughed, pistol shaking in his hands. “You think so? You fucking think so?”

The one beside him reached out for his shoulder. “Spirits, Van, let’s just get out of-“

The pistol jerked as he turned his head to shout something at his friend, and I took the chance. I shifted left, wrapped one hand around the gun, the other around his wrist, and pushed forward. He staggered back, I tripped him up with my foot, and we fell to the ground. I landed on top of him, shifted the pistol beneath his chin, and pushed down on his finger.

Blood shot from his forehead as the bullet exited, spattering on my face. The muzzle flash was close enough that it blinded me, and I could barely see as I yanked the pistol from his dead hands. Van’s friend tried to wrestle the gun away. I put three rapid rounds into his stomach.

I threw him off me and got to one knee, wincing. Felt like a rib had broken at some point. The one with the knife was shaking, trying to drag the woman to her feet. I shook my head and blinked rapidly, trying to clear the spots from my eyes.

“I’ll do it,” he stuttered out, trying to move towards the street. “I’ll do it if you don’t-“

Once I could see, I raised the pistol and fired. A clean shot, through one eye. He collapsed and the woman fell forward, crawling away and shoving herself up against the wall of the alley.

I turned around. The one who had fallen in the puddle had apparently laid there and watched all this take place. He gasped when I met his eyes, then scrambled to get to his feet, tried to run. I took my time aiming my shot and got him in the upper thigh before he exited the alley, which sent him careening back to the ground again.

He was breathing fast as I walked over, breath hitching and gasping. Hyperventilating. He tried to crawl away. “Please, no,” he sobbed. “Please, spirits, help me, please, please-“

“Spirits won’t help you, son,” I said as I stood over him. “Spirits don’t help.”

He rolled onto his back and raised one hand, palm out, pleading and shaking his head. “Please, no, don’t-“

The shot echoed off the walls of the alley and out into the night. The gun vented steam and beeped in my hands. I remember thinking it was typical of the Hierarchy to give sub-standard heatsinks to Taetran militia.

I sighed, and clutched a little at my side. Fear, anger, and adrenaline were all excellent painkillers until they were gone. I gingerly touched a hand to the back of my head and it came away blue. At least I didn’t have a fringe to stub anymore. Always a bright side.

I limped back towards the woman, tossing the gun off to the side and wiping some of the blood from my face. She was fully conscious now, looking shellshocked as she held up the tatters of her shawl to cover her bare waist. I didn’t get too close, just enough to be away from the bodies and pooling blood as I sat heavily on the ground and shook out another cigarette.

“You hurt?”

At first she didn’t hear me. I asked again, and she nodded, then shook her head.

I grimaced. I lit up, took a drag, then offered it to her. She reached out, haltingly, and took the cigarette, shaking a little as she smoked. She coughed, a broken sound.

“Could you do me a favor?” I asked. “You don’t have to if you don’t want.”

She looked at me and said nothing.

“Cops are gonna be here soon,” I said. “They’re gonna wanna know what happened with…” I trailed off and gestured vaguely at the scene around us.

Slowly, she nodded.

“I’d rather not spend my twilight years in a Taetran prison,” I said, shaking out another cigarette from the pack. “If you could tell ‘em it was self-defense, I’d say the same thing. There’s not enough evidence to say otherwise.

“Course, you could tell ‘em the truth,” I said, lighting up and taking another drag. “I’ve made my bed. I’ll lie in it if I have to.”

“It wasn’t?” she asked in a dull voice. “Self-defense?”

I stared at her dumbly. Smoke hung between us.

“Not the last one.”

I heard the beginnings of sirens in the distance. I looked out at the other end of the alley, past the body laying in stagnant rainwater.

Welcome home, Sorono. Been a long time.


	2. Old Hand

Taetran police procedure was another thing that hadn’t changed much in thirty years.

If you were a suspect, you got taken into custody. Then, back at the station, before anything else, they’d set you up in one of the smaller interrogation rooms, turn off all the cameras, and conduct a little informal interview. If they didn’t buy your story, or just didn’t like the answers, they’d work you over a little. If you stuck to your guns, the ‘interview’ could last almost an hour, at the end of which they carted you off to get processed - medical exam, scans, holo-imaging, the usual. Any damage they caused could be written off as resisting the initial arrest. Your word against theirs, and theirs was louder.

The guy I got couldn’t talk a confession out of a priest, but he had an authoritative voice and a decent punch. That was all it took for most petty criminals. Turians are terrible liars, and while duty and stoicism might carry you through a beating when you’re serving the state, some local hood dealing red sand is a different story.

I was a better liar than most, and that was before almost thirty years in the private sector. I got through alright, although I was half-convinced the guy wouldn’t have believed me no matter what I said.

I was nursing a few bruises in addition to my fractured ribs and head wound when processing was complete. They did some cursory applications of medi-gel - enough to make sure the wounds would heal, not enough to do much about the pain - then had a local doctor do a quick bone weave.

Finally, after all that, came the official interview. Cameras on, everyone nice and gentle. Different guy for that one. Shorter and a little older than the last one, or maybe just overworked. Dark plates with stark white markings that said he was from Vallum, obviously, and a rumpled uniform that looked like he might have slept in it the previous night. Part of me felt a sense of empathy, of shared experience. The rest of me didn’t.

He sat down and flicked open a transparent disposable datapad, thumbing through it absently, shaking his head. “Real mess out there,” he said.

I was quiet.

He laid out the pad and turned it towards me. When I didn’t look at it, he glared at me. “Four dead. That’s mass murder, you know. Different charge than homicide.”

I didn’t know that, actually. C-Sec has different standards for spree killings.

“You were at the scene,” he continued. “Your prints are on the gun. Ballistics has already traced the metal to the ammo block.”

I highly doubted that Taetran CSIs were as fast as the Citadel’s, but I had no doubt they’d get there eventually, so I didn’t argue.

“Story you gave to the arresting officers was ‘self-defense.’” I was very glad he didn’t use air quotes. “We’re talking to the girl now. If she has something different to say, that’s it for you. You’re done. Open and closed case.”

I sniffed loudly. Still felt like there was a little blood in my nose.

“So you could save us all a lot of time and… consternation, if you’d just tell us the truth now.” He leaned forward, pointing at the datapad. “I’ve got four dead kids here. I’d like to be able to tell their parents why they won’t be seeing their next servicedays.”

I leaned forward, propping my elbows up and resting my chin on cuffed hands.

“Well?” he asked.

I blinked slowly. Then I yawned.

He narrowed his eyes. I coughed into my hands and sniffed again, taking my sweet time before I spoke.

“Look, kid,” I said, “we both know if you had anything, you wouldn’t be in here. All you’ve got is ballistics and trajectories, both of which tell you exactly nothing except general proximity, and the woman, who you’ve already talked to while I was enjoying your hospitality. And since you haven’t thrown the metaphorical book at me, I can assume she corroborated my story. So the only reason you’re here is because something isn’t sitting well in your gut.

“So here’s what’s going to happen: I’m not going to say anything else, and since you don’t have enough evidence to hold me on any criminal charges, you’ll throw me in the tank for the night. I’ll get a bad night’s sleep next to drunks, junkies, and vagrants, and in the morning, you’ll show me the door.”

“Is that so?” he said bitterly.

I smiled and said nothing else.

He leaned back and crossed his arms. After a few minutes of staring at each other, he shoved himself to his feet, snatched the datapad off the metal table, and stormed out the door.

I turned and waved at the wall to my left, where I knew the one-way holo was projected, just to rub it in a little. After a minute, another cop came to collect me, and showed me to the tank.

It doesn’t matter where you go in the galaxy, tanks are always the same. Grey walls, grey floors, grey ceiling, all metal or cement with a grate in the center of the floor to make things easy to hose down. Light strips high along the wall, piping in ugly fluorescent white, and if you were very lucky, a tiny window. I wasn’t lucky.

And, of course, the usual group of unfortunates. That night there were four in the tiny room - a drunk collapsed on one of the cots, vomit crusted on his mandibles which spread every time he snored. A junkie who kept rocking back and forth in a corner, fingers twitching spasmodically and eyes sometimes looking in two directions at once. A woman with a tan hide laying on the only other cot, facing the wall. And a young one sitting against the far wall whose markings were so bright I suspected he’d gotten them in the last month.

The guard slammed the door shut behind me and I heard it lock in at least two different ways. I looked up at the unobtrusive security filament hiding in a corner and flicked an irritated mandible its way before I sat down against the wall. I gave the junkie a bit of a berth and took the side closer to the drunk. The smell wasn’t pleasant, but at least I could be certain he wasn’t a threat.

I rested the still-tender back of my head against the wall and closed my eyes. Then the young one spoke in a voice that sounded like it had only just broken.

“Carcosa?”

I opened my eyes. He was staring at me from across the room. I rechecked his markings - he was a northerner.

“Yeah,” I said. “You?”

He nodded. “Just came from there.”

“How long?”

“A week, maybe.”

I huffed. “A week in the big city and you’re already in the tank.”

He shrugged casually. Too casually for someone his age. “Had a bad pick.”

I almost smiled. “Who?”

“Cop’s wife.”

Now I really did smile. “He catch you with your hand in her pocket?”

The boy shook his head. “Was doin’ the samaritan. Came up with the wallet, said you dropped this-“

“Swapped out one of the chits for a reader?”

He shook his head again. “No, man, shit’s wireless now. You use a writer to put the reader on one of their chits. Way easy, less risky.”

“Huh.” I settled a little against the wall. “Guess some things do change.”

He cocked his head and squinted. “How old are you, grandpa? You just get out or something?”

“Something like,” I admitted. “How’d they figure you out, if it was so easy?”

The boy scratched at the new markings on his mandible. “Cop husband saw another wallet sticking out of my pocket. Grabbed me and shook me down, found the rest.”

“You were doing more than one at once?”

He looked away and ducked his head slightly, looking petulant. “Figured I’d write ‘em all at once.”

I chuckled. The boy glared at me and I waved him off. “If you’re gonna pick pockets, you’re gonna have to learn a little patience.”

“That so? You some kinda old hand, grandpa?”

“No. But I used to make a living out of plucking fools like you out of a crowd for screwing up.” I flared my mandibles in a wicked kind of grin. “And don’t call me grandpa.”

That shut the boy up. He hugged his knees and looked away. I leaned back against the wall and was trying to remember what time it was when they dragged me in here when he spoke again.

“You been back lately?” the boy asked, not looking at me.

“Where?”

“Carcosa.”

I took a breath. “No. Why?”

He shook his head and shrugged. “It’s… rough.”

I stared at him. Then I glanced around the room, at the woman pretending to sleep on the cot, at the sad drunk, at the junkie still twitching silently in the corner.

“It’s rough everywhere, kid.”

* * *

 

I woke from vague, unsettling dreams when something shoved my shoulder.

“Hey,” a voice said. “Wake up.”

I blinked my eyes open and winced. I didn’t know if it was the mild hangover or the mild concussion, but the fluorescence of the tank was doing nothing for my headache.

“Time to go,” the voice said, disinterested. “You can collect your things from the lockup on the way out.”

I pinched the bridge of my flat nose between two talons. It didn’t help any. Wondered why asari and humans did it.

“Come on, hurry up.”

I looked up and to my left, and squinted at the cop. No one I recognized from last night. Must be another shift.

“Why?” I asked. “You got somewhere else to be?”

He furrowed his browplates and poked me in the forehead with the stun baton he was holding. It wasn’t on, but the message was clear.

“Yeah, yeah,” I muttered as I pushed to my feet. My back hurt from sleeping against the wall, made me feel older than I already did.

None of the other patrons of the tank were there. Must have got out early, or been transferred to some other cells somewhere in the station. I doubted anyone would have posted bail. Well. Maybe for the woman or the drunk.

We headed through the station, which I barely recognized. It looked as underfunded as I remembered Taetran police stations looking, but either I had never been to this particular precinct, or it had been rebuilt after the war. Lots of glass walls and fresh looking metal and concrete, surrounding messy, beaten up old desks and holo-imagers and touch screens CPUs that were at least three generations out of date. There were paper files and disposable datapads across nearly every surface, some on labeled shelves, some on desks, some sitting on top of a tiny aquarium that was clearly the result of someone higher up trying to ‘improve morale and productivity through a more pleasant work environment.’

Two of the fish were dead. I couldn’t decide if that was funny or not.

We got to lockup, and my escort exchanged a few words with the woman seated at the desk behind the glass. She checked off some list I couldn’t see, stood, and marched back into the metal shelving units behind her. When she came back, she disengaged the force field to my left and stepped out, arms full.

I didn’t make a move for it. I knew the procedure. She started to sort through it, speaking aloud to her omni-tool, glowing on her wrist.

“Brown jacket-“

“Burnt sienna.”

She stopped and blinked. The other cop turned to stare at me too.

I flicked a mandible and shrugged. “Never mind.”

The woman from lockup shook her head and returned to her work. “Brown jacket, short, paneled, Carthaan leather. Two exterior pockets, containing one nanokey, blank, and one pack of cigarettes, Alyria brand. Two interior pockets, containing small metal case, empty, small metal cylinder, also empty, and one wallet. Contents of wallet, one hundred fifty credits in chits, two bank cards, three business cards, and one photo.”

I really needed to toss that photo.

She handed me each item in turn. I threw on the jacket, flipped the collar over my cowl, stuck the cigarette case and wallet back where they belonged, tucked everything else in the outside pockets, pulled back my sleeve and held out my arm.

“Omni-tool,” the officer said, snapping the minifacturing bracelet onto my wrist. “Serrice Council Arbiter model, custom modified. No illegal material present.”

My escort blew out a breath through flared mandibles. “Arbiter,” he said, nodding his head. “Nice.”

“Wish we got some of that hardware,” the woman agreed.

“They’re more temperamental than you’d think,” I said, keying it on to make sure everything was still there. “You overclock them more than two percent and they get unstable, crashes half the time you try to multitask more than two programs at once.”

“Least you can multitask,” she griped. “I get to work lockup with a Bluewire.”

“Ouch,” I said, keying off the tool.

“Some deal between the Alliance and the Hierarchy,” she said, resting her hands on her hips. “I’m sure they got the better end of it. Aldrin Labs can’t design a haptic interface to save their-“

“Officers.”

She stiffened and almost snapped to attention. The other cop beside me did likewise. I turned and saw the same investigator from my interrogation last night. The second one. His clothes looked as rumpled as before, but at least he looked like he’d slept. Or was on some very nice stims.

“Are you finished?” he asked curtly.

“Yes, Investigator Parthus,” the woman replied.

“Then I’ll take him the rest of the way.” He shot a glare at my previous escort. “You’re dismissed.”

Without another word, Parthus pressed a hand to my shoulder and directed me forward. I’ve never liked being pushed around, but I was more than happy to expedite my departure from that damn station.

We marched down another corridor, passing uniforms heading this way or that. Busy morning. But it had been a long time since the Citadel. I’d probably forgotten what ‘busy’ really was.

“Got a call from your lawyer today, Sartorus.”

I bit back a smug grin and said, “How is Kip these days?”

“As bullish a salarian as I’ve ever seen,” Parthus grumbled. “He’s the reason you’re walking out of here early. If I had it my way, you’d see the inside of that tank for the rest of the day. And the rest of your natural life.”

“Glad you caved, then.”

I could practically feel him bristle as he walked beside me. His next words were clipped and curt.

“You watch yourself, Sartorus. You slip up again, no fast-talking salarian lawyer is going to be able to catch you.”

I frowned at him. “What’s your problem with me, anyway?”

He looked at me like I was crazy. “You killed four people. Members of Vallum’s Ninth Legion. Young men with futures.”

“In-“

“Self-defense,” he cut off, “I heard. And I don’t buy it. One, two, maybe even three of them might have been drunk or stupid enough to try and take you or the woman when you got a hold of the gun. But not four.”

I kept my eyes forward and fought the urge to scratch at my palms. “And what makes you say that?”

“Probability.”

“Not an exact science.”

“And experience.”

Parthus stopped us as we entered the main lobby. Officers all around us, some coming in for the morning shift, others leaving from the night. They kept a respectful distance from us, and I wondered if that was because of him or me.

“Don’t think I don’t know why you did it,” he said, voice low. “Don’t think I wouldn’t feel the same way. But this city has enough vigilante garbage without off-worlders coming here and adding to it.”

I’ve never liked Taetrus. I’ve never felt it was anywhere but a dead end for anyone stupid enough to stay there. But somehow, being called an ‘off-worlder’ really stung. My mandibles flared and Parthus smiled in a self-satisfied sort of way.

“I pulled your file,” he said. “Last time you were here was 2177, working IED disposal, and you were only here on a compulsory tour. I’ve got transfer requests as far back as ‘68. You’ve spent your entire adult life trying to get away. Far as I’m concerned, you don’t deserve those markings.”

I ground my teeth. “For being smart enough to want to get off this mudball?”

He narrowed his eyes. “For being a coward.”

Investigator Parthus turned on his heel and walked away without another word. I was left standing in the entrance of the station, fists clenching and unclenching at my sides, knowing he was wrong, but feeling like he was right.


	3. A Lot of Bad Things

I left the station and found myself on a third-story pedway in the dim morning sun. Fairly light sky traffic for downtown Vallum, and not a soul in sight on the elevated walkway.

Except for her. Standing at the foot of the short stairs leading to the pedway proper, in new clothes and a long, light jacket in a fashionable green to go with the feathers in her fringe.

"Hey," she said, in a strong, lilting voice. "Hoped I'd catch you."

I never expected to see her again, so I was caught a little off-balance. I descended the stairs, hands in my pockets, and regarded her.

"What's the matter?" she asked. "Didn't think anyone would be waiting for you on the other side?"

"No," I admitted. "I don't know anyone in Vallum."

"You know me."

My mandibles flared into a smile I wasn't expecting. "I don't even know your name."

"That's hardly the point," she countered. "But it's Amina. Amina Karath."

I extended a hand. "Sorono Sartorus."

We shook. Amina Karath had long fingers and a strong grip. She looked me up and down and smiled, the first one I'd seen from her.

"You look like shit."

For some reason, that was the funniest thing I'd heard in weeks. I barked out a laugh, and winced a little as the pain fizzled out in my ribs.

"You okay?" she asked, though she made no move towards me.

"Well," I said with a groan, "I got the living hell beat out of me by four plastered militiamen, spent the night sleeping against a concrete wall, woke up with a mild hangover kicking around my skull, and I haven't had a decent smoke in a couple days."

"So you've been better?"

She wrung another smile out of me. "I've been better."

Amina turned and inclined her head down the pedway. We started walking together.

"At least you have an excuse," she said, a little bitterly. "I had a weapon, surprise, and sobriety on my side."

"They were four of them," I said, somewhat obviously. "Bad odds any way you slice it."

"Didn't stop you," she noted.

"I wasn't exactly thinking at the time."

She shrugged. "Anyway, there were three last time this happened, and I came out alright."

The words themselves were bad enough, but it was the casual way she said them that made my stomach turn. I started to wonder again why I was here. In Vallum. On Taetrus. Talking to a woman I didn't know about things I'd rather not think about.

I stopped. She took a couple more steps before she noticed, and turned around looking curious.

"Where are we going?" I asked.

She shrugged again. "I figured we'd get some breakfast. They don't feed you well in the station, if they bother to at all."

"And then?"

"Then?" She shifted her weight from one hip to another, crossing her arms. "I don't know. I didn't really think that far ahead."

I felt a little stupid for asking. I guess part of me was still a little punchy from the multiple interrogations and the dressing down I'd gotten from Parthus. She was just trying to repay a favor. Who the hell was I to refuse a kindness?

"Sorry," I said, ducking my head a little. "It's been a rough couple of days."

She stared at me and said nothing.

"And now I'm whining to the woman who got attacked last night." I sighed, shaking my head and rubbing the skin around my eyes. "Sorry. Again. I'm a real charmer, you can tell."

Amina made a dismissive noise, but her mandibles twitched in an amused sort of way, and I detected a note of dry humor in her subharmonics when she said, "Let's just eat, huh?"

I stepped up alongside her and we resumed our walk.

"You got a place in mind?"

* * *

It was a little hole-in-the-wall diner in that undefinable grey area between the nice part of town and everything else. Nothing fancy, but clean, cheap, and came complete with a friendly atmosphere, if you cared about that sort of thing.

We took one of the booths and Amina ordered kava for the both of us - 'the strongest in town,' she said - and a light cossius salad. I ordered a Skyllian-style breakfast, which was basically a big plate of sausages and fruit served with some kind of syrup that you poured over the whole thing. This particular diner's was kymaberry.

The kava arrived first. Amina took the opportunity to tell an old Taetran joke.

"To peace," she said, raising her mug.

"To peace," I replied with a grin. She clinked her cup against mine and we drank. It was as strong as advertised and tasted like it had been made weeks ago.

"That's an old one. Before your time."

She nodded, cradling her cup in her hands as she propped her elbows on the table. "Never went out of style. As you can imagine."

The food arrived. I tucked in with the eagerness of a man who had forgotten the last time he'd eaten.

"So, were you a cop or did you do time?"

She looked up, the tines of her fork still in her mouth. She swallowed and said, "How about you?"

"I asked first."

"I don't care."

I let my mandibles droop in a pout. I couldn't exactly argue with that. "The former. But not here."

"Where, then?"

"Citadel."

"Ahh," she said, as though that solved some great mystery. "I see."

"See what?" I asked, narrowing my eyes.

She gestured at me with her fork. "Something about you that's not exactly local. Couldn't put my finger on it." She shrugged. "But then, I don't know many northerners. Maybe they're all like you."

I scoffed loudly and stuck another mouthful of sickly-sweet and syrupy fruit into my mouth. A silent minute passed as we ate.

I took another drink of kava and said, "You never answered my question."

She didn't look up from her plate. I figured she'd pretend not to hear me until I dropped it.

"Did time."

I blinked, lowered my mandibles and shrugged a little. I wasn't really surprised, and it hardly mattered. "How much?"

"Not a lot."

"For what?"

She shrugged and went for her kava, cradling it in both hands. "Vandalism, public nuisance, shoplifting. Kid stuff."

"Misdemeanors. Not time."

"There may have been a few 'resisting arrests' in there, too," she said, meeting my eyes over the rim of the cup.

"Ahh," I said, mimicking her tone. "I see."

Amina rolled her eyes and returned to her food, spearing a piece of lemba bread. "Never more than a few months at a stretch. Enough to know how the system works."

"Badly?" I offered.

She smiled. It made her look older, somehow. "Sure. We'll go with that."

We finished our meal. I offered to pay, and she told me in no uncertain terms that it wasn't happening. I said it was the last thing I'd let her do for me and acquiesced. We would have stuck around and nursed our kava, but our waitress kindly informed me that smoking ruins the 'friendly atmosphere' of the place, so we stepped outside where I could light up.

I took a long drag and slowly breathed it out. Amina was smiling at me again.

"What?" I asked, cocking my head.

"I was wondering where you got that handsome timbre of yours," she said dryly. Then she caught the scent of the smoke and clamped her mandibles against her face.

I chuckled and waved my hand to dispel some of the lingering tendrils. "Asari cloves. Not my usual brand. Used to hate the things."

"What changed?"

I waited half a beat too long, shrugged a little too casually. "Someone I knew smoked them religiously. Got used to it."

She stuck her hands in her coat pockets. After peering at me a moment, she asked, "Wife or girlfriend?"

I looked away, down the street. Sucked in another drag of scented smoke and almost coughed, then plucked it from my mouth and dropped it to the sidewalk.

"Thanks for breakfast," I said politely as I stepped on the embers. "Appreciate it."

"Least I could do."

"You already lied for me."

She tilted her head. "Wasn't really a lie from what I saw."

I've never been very good at goodbyes. I just raised one hand in a casual salute, nodded, and started to walk away.

"Where are you going?"

I turned around and blinked at her. "I don't know."

She looked across the street. "Memorial Plaza isn't far from here. Decent day for a walk."

I waited for her to continue. When she didn't, I shifted my weight and said, "Okay?"

Amina crossed her arms and flared one mandible into a smirk. "You have an appointment to keep?"

"No."

"Any place you'd rather be?"

"Nowhere on this planet," I answered honestly.

Her smirk became a smile and she jerked her head. "Then c'mon. Sun won't be out forever this time of year."

I hesitated. But she was right about one thing: I didn't have a damned clue what I was going to do next. Might as well let someone else lead my around by the hand until I figured it out.

* * *

Memorial Plaza is a poor excuse for a park. Too-short red grass with patches of sickly purple, trees that were too young to be impressive or give you any real shade, a small lake with a fountain that no one was swimming in. Too many paths and benches and lamps, not enough nature.

Still, people went. Because there wasn't really anywhere else to go to unless you left the city. And it was pleasant enough with company.

The memorials themselves were the typical highlight - ringed with lights and spotlamps that would light them up at night, carved from metal and granite and striking even higher than the trees. It would be impressive to anyone who'd never seen a turian memorial before. If you had, you'd know they were a bit smaller than most.

The wall commemorating the Reaper War was the largest, of course. Covered in script enumerating the fallen from this particular world, it stretched in a semi-circle around the north end of the park, curving upward near the center. The typical statue of Commander Shepard dominated the center, looking skyward and determined. Not the best likeness I've seen, but acceptable. Not even Taetrus would screw that up.

Amina was born after the war. She talked about her parents. How her mom was a biotic, and her dad was a field medic, and they met because she blew out her amp trying to throw a brute off a cliff. I told her a few tales of my own, but tried to keep it light - old jokes and stories, pranks and fights. It ended up making me feel damn old, and I told her so. She laughed and told me to cheer the hell up, that this was a war memorial for spirits' sake. Couldn't help but laugh at that.

There was the second memorial, at the south end, of the Unification War. Same one every turian capital has, complete with the statue of a nameless soldier with Taetran markings (from Vallum, of course) kneeling atop an oblong pedestal. Holographic planets projected from the base slowly rotated around him, each marked with their respective colony pattern - Aephus' segmented blocks, Digeris' jagged edges, Oma Ker's ornate traceries. Taetrus' markings were most similar to Palaven's, which I always thought was ironic - simple lines, square edges, and right angles.

Neither of us had much to say about it. The usual bitching about how Palaven looked larger than all the other worlds despite its actual size, making fun of Rocam's pattern and how it makes everyone who wears it look like they're smiling all the time. Talk about which planet in the Hierarchy made the best liquor, which we agreed was Epyrus.

Then there was the least ornate memorial - a giant obelisk standing tall in the center. No holographs, no statues, only a few spotlights. A single large plaque at the base, in simple script, with words in old Cipritese - 'For Taetran Dead.'

The War on Taetrus lasted a handful of months, over thirty years ago. It wasn't glorious, or honorable. It started with a terrorist attack that left over ten thousand dead, and ended with a systematic extermination of Facinus leadership by the Hierarchy. A brutal show of force not seen since the Unification War. The reasons for the attack that started the whole thing were never even acknowledged. The large, grey, unmarked pillar seemed to reflect that.

Amina gave it a wide berth and made no comment.

It was mid-afternoon when we left the park, sun already dipping low on the horizon and behind the skyline of the city. She said she knew a decent bar nearby. I thought it was a little early, but this was her show. I told her she wouldn't be picking up the tab and followed.

* * *

"Okay," she said, raising her bottle to her mouth. "Highest rank."

"Second Lieutenant," I said, taking a swig of my own beer, a decent but expensive bit of Carthaan dark brew. "Not that it lasted long."

"That sounds like a story."

"Sure does." I leaned away and threw my arm over the back of the booth. "Your turn."

Amina threw me a smirk as she shifted in her seat, elbows settling slightly against the table. "Lieutenant Commander."

I slowly raised my hand and saluted. She reached across the table and slapped at my wrist.

"Next?" she asked mildly.

"Hmm." I scratched at my chin with a dull talon. "Worst posting."

She laughed bitterly. "Invictus."

"No kidding? At least tell me you were posted in the capital."

"No such luck." Amina leaned back and took another swig of her beer, some Elurian malted thing that smelled too sweet. "You only got Shastinasio if you were somebody's friend, or did your time in the smaller cities. I was in Gigaros, on the border of one of the deserts closest to the equator. Two years of stinging desert gnats, rainstorms rolling in from the jungle, and the occasional night fevers that they had to sedate you for. Not to mention the actual work of maintaining order in a colony that close to the Terminus Systems."

She shook her head, feathers wafting gently in the still, quiet air of the bar. "Never figure out how they tricked people into going there."

"Political theater," I said, plucking my still-lit cigarette from the glass ashtray and taking another drag. "Some jumped-up bareface wanted to make herself look good, managed to eke out a city somehow. Made all the usual pitches, 'opportunity' and 'adventure' and 'fresh start.' By the time everyone figured out it would take generations to properly tame the place, she was a Primarch and they were stuck there."

"You make it sound like you were there." She tilted her head and peered at me. "You can't be that ancient."

I chuckled and stubbed out the butt in the tray. "Nah, just the only thing I bothered to remember from the histories I had to read back in school. They play it up nice, but even back then, it always smelled like crap to me."

"A cynic at nine. Somehow I'm not surprised." Amina smiled. "Your turn."

"Oh, that's easy," I said, sweeping my arm out. "Right here."

She made a dismissive noise and looked away.

"I'm serious. Someone had it out for me, and I got assigned to the Boom Patrol."

Her browplates lowered and she turned back to me. "The what?"

I sighed loudly. "Oh spirits, do they not call it that anymore? IED disposal. Bomb squad."

"Oh." She blinked, looked more surprised than I thought she would be, then took another sip of her beer. "Never heard that before."

"Of all the things to change..." I grumbled. "Anyway. Posting had the highest mortality rate in the sector. No fancy legion banners or histories. No glory or medals. Just... this." I gestured vaguely at my face, the scars and cracks and broken fringe that everyone saw and no one ever mentioned. I chuckled darkly. "Hell, didn't even pay well."

She hummed a little, leaning on her elbows again, cradling the bottle's triangular neck in both sets of fingers. "So who'd you piss off and how bad to get a post like that?"

I smiled humorlessly. "A general. Very badly."

"Ahh," she breathed. "Another story."

I grunted and looked away, toward the front of the bar we'd been holding down for the last hour or so. Quiet. Not too busy. Nice selection. And plenty of ashtrays. Not as much 'character' as Nid's, but when I went to a bar, it wasn't for the ambiance.

I was thinking about leaving, constructing my little 'it's been fun' speech in my head, when she asked, "What was it like?"

"Hm?"

I turned back. Amina was eyeing me curiously.

"Carcosa."

I blinked stupidly. Then I shrugged. "Same as anywhere else."

"Come on, Sor," she said knowingly.

"We're using nicknames, now?"

"Unless you'd rather I call you 'Mr. Sartorus.' "

I groaned. "Please no."

"Then out with it." Amina lowered the dangling bottle to the table and wrapped her hands around the base. "It's my turn, and that's my question. What was home like?"

I thought about trying to deflect again, but I knew she wouldn't have it. I could already tell the woman was as stubborn as anything. I'd have had more luck trying to teach a pyjak how to count.

"It wasn't anything," I said lamely.

Amina's shoulders seemed to tense as she pulled in her elbows. She looked down at her bottle, toying with a feather in her fringe. "If I stepped in something, you don't have to say."

"No." I shifted a little in my seat and drummed my fingers along the back of the bench seat. "I didn't have a terrible childhood if that's what you're thinking. Not that it was all sunshine and rainbows, but..." I sighed, mostly at myself. "Just not something I've talked about a lot.

"At first, I just wanted to see the galaxy. Go places, see things most people never saw. Then, after a while, wanting to see other worlds became wanting to get away from this one." I shook my head. "Even back then, before it had a name or a face, everyone knew what was coming. You saw it in the news, or on the vids. Could practically feel it in the air.

"Everyone knew what was coming, and no one did a damn thing about it." I reached for my pack and shook out my last cigarette. "I never saw the sense in staying here. The good of it. No offense."

I lit up with my omni-tool, and looked up to find Amina staring at the table, tracing the ring of sweat her bottle had left with one finger.

"Guess I can't blame you," she said quietly, like she wasn't really talking to me. "There's other causes to die for."

Parthus' reprimand still echoed in my ears. Coward. Off-worlder.

I was so wrapped in my own thoughts I almost didn't hear her when she said, "I told you I did time. I never really said what for."

I waited patiently as she drained the last of her beer and placed the bottle gently on the table. "A few peaceful protests that turned not-so-peaceful."

My eyes widened. I felt my teeth click against each other. "So when those boys were shouting 'Facinus' at you, they were more accurate than they knew."

"I sympathize with the cause," she said quickly but definitively, not quite meeting my eyes. "That's all. And those men wouldn't have cared what province I was from."

I nodded slowly. Then set aside my cigarette and took one last swallow of my own drink.

Maybe I should have been more put off, sitting across from a woman with rebellious sympathies. I served the Hierarchy for years, did my time like any other good citizen, learned all the talk of duty and honor and sacrifice that gets drilled into you from your very first year. But that doesn't mean I have any real love for government. Certainly doesn't mean I can't see why a group of neglected, backwater colonists think they could manage their affairs better on their own.

Taetrus is one of the oldest of the colony worlds. One of the first the turian people charted, landed on, and claimed for their own. That's its only claim to fame. Always figured that was one of the reasons the Hierarchy never sat down to discuss things with the opposition. Well, that, and they've never respected sedition. Humans and krogan tend to romanticize rebellion. Turians demonize it.

I've never been a great turian, but I was getting ready to excuse myself much more hastily than I had planned when Amina pushed herself to her feet. She looked at me and nodded in the direction of the bartender.

"So?" she asked genially. "You gonna pick up the tab or aren't you?"

And I decided to let the matter drop.

Another mistake to add to the list.

* * *

We ended up at some open-air food stand on the corner. We hadn't eaten in a while, and we were both a little drunk. Some charred krysae would help us sober up a bit. The stand was still reasonably busy, despite the cold and the late hour. I figured it must be one of the only places that stays open late. We took a seat at one of the tables beneath the thin metal roof and tucked in.

It was there that she asked the question.

"You have a place to stay?"

I removed my mouth from where I'd been about to tear off a strip of the kebab and blinked. "Not really."

"Could always crash at my place," she offered. "I've got an extra pillow, a blanket, and a totally uncomfortable couch."

I huffed. "Thanks, but no thanks. I'm not exactly destitute. I'll get a room somewhere."

She shrugged. "Then I'll walk you there."

"Not necessary."

"Well, the alternative is to let an old man walk the streets of Vallum late at night alone." She smiled crookedly. "What kind of person would I be if I did that?"

"I'm going to pretend I didn't hear that," I said dryly, tearing another strip of meat off my kebab. "I was thinking of taking a cab anyway. This old man has done enough walking today."

She laughed. I liked her voice.

We finished and headed up to a cab stand another block up the street. Hailed the first one that came by. Before I could start into my 'goodbye,' she ducked inside and shut the door behind her. I followed, and scanned one of my chits in the reader. I didn't know Vallum as well as I used to, but when I first arrived, I noticed a hotel nearer the starport. Gave the cabbie the name, and off we went.

Amina was quiet inside the skycar. I couldn't blame her - even with the soundproof shield up between us and the pilot, it wasn't exactly a private atmosphere. She kept glancing at me, or out the window, and adjusting her coat.

We arrived, and I tipped the cabbie and climbed out. Again, before I could say a word, Amina stepped out after me and walked right inside the automatic double doors of the hotel. I went after her.

Inside was one of those nicer hotel lobbies, between three and four stars. The little waiting area no one ever uses, holovid screen projecting the news, fireplace in the center for the winter, not that the place ever needed the heat. Everything cream or white or silver, neutral, relaxing colors. The front desk was large and occupied by a single man in purple markings.

Amina was looking around and making impressed sounds as she examined the decor. I went past her to the front desk and booked a room for the night, with the option for more. The young man behind the desk looked at me, then over my shoulder at her, then at me again. I sneered and told him to just scan the damn card already.

We rode the elevator up to my floor. She stayed quiet as we walked down the corridor toward my room. It wasn't until we stood in front of my door and I turned around to face her that she spoke. "You gonna invite me in?"

I stared at her. Then I raised my card in front of the scanner, the door unlocked and opened, and I gestured inside.

It was dark, and she didn't bother turning on any lights. Instead, she flung open the curtains. The building across the street was smaller than the hotel, and the one behind it too, the skyscrapers on either side dwarfing the older, square buildings. It was a gash in the skyline, a great glass and metal ravine. Lights shone in numerous windows, people still awake, or still working. Skycars drifted lazily by, headlights flaring briefly, silhouetting her against the window.

The room was small, but well-appointed, with an open-air kitchen to my left with a bar and a counter, a refrigeration unit and a stove. The living area had a collapsed vidscreen, a small table, a pair of couches, and a chair. A door on the leftmost wall, past the small bar, led to the single bedroom.

I stood near the door, which closed behind me. I felt oddly trapped.

"I'd offer a nightcap, but..." I shrugged and spread my hands out.

Amina turned from the window and walked my way, shrugging out of her coat, revealing a trim waist. "It's alright. I think I've had enough for the night."

I found I had to fight more than I would have liked to keep my subharmonics neutral. "Yeah. Me too."

She tossed her coat on the kitchen counter and crossed her arms. "Too bad. I would have liked a reason to stay."

"Can't think of a reason why you should."

Slowly, she walked around me, and with my still mildly tipsy condition, my first thought was that she was headed for the door, but her coat was still on the counter. She was playing with me.

I kept my eyes on her, half-turning as she circled me. "Are you sure?" she asked quietly.

I clenched my jaw at the undertone in her subharmonics. "Honestly, all I can think of are reasons you should leave."

She halted. She was between me and the door. "Tell me."

I faced her fully and centered myself, hands easy at my sides, voice in full control. "You're still drunk."

"So are you," she retorted softly, taking a step forward.

"I'm old enough to be your father." Grandfather, probably, but even then I had enough pride not to say that out loud.

"That's nice," she said dismissively, taking another step. "But I'm not in the market for one."

My mandibles flickered and I resisted the urge to scratch at the back of my head. "You could do better."

Silently, she took another step forward, inches away from me. She was tall, as tall as me. Willowy. But she had strength. Presence.

She stared at my eyes, at the cracks in the plates around them, at the rust colored hide beneath, at the discolored skin around my throat, and then, pointedly, at my broken fringe. She lingered for only a second before she went back to my eyes.

Amina uncrossed her arms and laid her palms against my chest. "Let's agree to disagree."

When I didn't make a move, she leaned in, pressed her forehead to mine. I closed my eyes, felt her brush her cheek against my mandible, then lean past and nip at the base. I rested my hands gently on her hips, ducked my head and licked the skin of her throat. She gasped in my ear. Her hands rose from my chest to my cowl and gripped firmly. My thumbs traced little circles through the fabric of her pants and I breathed her in. Wildflowers and dew and something else, something familiar.

Something like home.

I shook myself and grabbed at her shoulders, pushed her away.

"What?" she asked, a little breathlessly. "What's wrong?"

"You. Me." I shook my head, almost but not quite meeting her eyes. I removed my hands and turned away, running my mouth. "Us. This. Here, now. This city, this planet, everything on it. Take your pick."

I sighed and rested my hands on my hips. When I gathered up the courage to turn back, Amina had crossed her arms again, less playful and more like she was trying to protect herself. Her harmonics were tightly controlled when she asked, "Are you bonded?"

I bristled a little. "Never."

"Girlfriend?"

"No." Not anymore.

She seemed to relax, just a little. "Then what?"

I stared at her hard. "I'm a lot of bad things, Amina. Maybe I don't want to add 'sleazy cradle-robber' to the list."

"Sleazy-" Her voice hitched, and grew in volume. "You think I'm a child? That I don't know what I'm doing?"

I ground my teeth. "I don't know what to think."

"Well, that makes two of us."

We just stood there for a while. I didn't know what else to say, and I guess neither did she. Eventually, she walked over and took her coat from the counter, draping it over her forearm. She looked at me again, oddly. In the dark, I couldn't see her expression clear enough, but I imagined it was anger. Or pity.

She turned and left, closing the door after her. I didn't move until I saw her shadow leave the light beneath the door. Then I stomped to the living area and kicked the table over. It landed with a deadened thud.

I'd been two days on Taetrus, and so far, I'd killed four men, been jailed, spent too much money on not enough booze, made and lost exactly one friend, and kicked a woman out of my hotel room.

This trip was going about as well as I'd thought it would.


	4. Spiral Downward

I paced around the room until I knew she was gone. I didn't look out the window. I didn't even go near it. The last thing I wanted to see was her looking up at me.

The hotel had room service, but I didn't use it. I headed downstairs and around the block to a convenience store, picked up an expensive bottle of whiskey, a cheap bottle of booze, and lingered on the cigarettes. They had my brand.

Got the asari cloves instead. If I was going to have a pity party, figured I might as well go all the way.

When I got back, I cracked open the expensive stuff first. Always leave the cheap stuff for when you're too drunk to care. I only used a glass because the room came with several. I didn't bother with ice.

I grudgingly righted the table I'd flipped, took a seat in the easy chair, and cracked open the pack, stripping off the plastic and tearing the foil. I like to have something to do with my hands, even if it's just simple muscle memory. Helps me focus on something else.

But even when I set myself fully to the task of chain smoking and drinking myself into a stupor, I couldn't stop myself from thinking. I kept replaying the day in my mind. Couldn't help but wonder if maybe I should have just given in and taken her up on her offer, much as I knew I'd regret it. Didn't imagine I'd ever see her again.

Halfway through the first bottle, I had thrown out any plans for sleep.

At some point, my thoughts shifted away from Amina and toward my reason for being here at all. What I'd hoped to achieve by coming to Taetrus. No reason and nothing at all, were the only answers I had. Or the only ones I was comfortable admitting to myself.

But liquor, good liquor, has a way of getting you all... nostalgic. And at the tail end of that first bottle of two hundred fifty credit Epyrean whiskey, I took a deep breath of the scented smoke in the air and finally started that spiral downward.

I booted up my omni-tool, set it on the table in front of me, and started a holoprojected slideshow of the photos I kept on the CPU. Most of them were work related, schematics or locations, various different wide shots of construction sites. A few shots of friends. My assistant. Old war buddies. My time at C-Sec, shots of the Citadel and messy desks and Vakarian making obscene gestures at the camera. Then a few shots from various deployments. Various crewmen. Various women. Most of them dead, the ones that weren't I didn't keep in touch with much.

And then, of course, there were pictures of her.

I shouldn't have kept them. I knew that. Told myself I'd go through and delete the whole batch one day, but I always put it off. Never seemed like a good time.

Deep blue skin. Flowing crest. Elegantly edged white marks around her eyes and cheeks, like colony markings, but born with them. Big eyes, but not too big, always half-lidded, like she could see you just fine, but you weren't quite worth her full attention. Long fingers, thin waist, and full lips, curved into a wicked smile that never really left her face.

Her father was a turian, her mother some fancy matriarch. I think she came from money. She never said, and I never asked. She'd wandered into my life one day and simply never left. Kept saying she would, but she always thought of a reason to put it off. Always smiling at me like I was the only one who got the joke she'd told.

The slideshow played on. I reached down to the floor and fumbled with the jacket I'd dropped after I collapsed into the chair, pulling out my wallet. I opened it and plucked out the photo.

She's smiling, but not at me. Something off to the side. One arm draped around my neck, the other dangling a cigarette from between two of her five fingers. She's wearing a dress, high cut, one she liked to wear whenever we went out. One leg crossed over the other, revealing just enough skin to draw the attention of everyone in the room.

Whatever had caught her attention, I wasn't interested in. I was staring at her. I did that a lot.

Five months and twenty one days. Twenty two, if I felt like being technical.

One night she was there, smiling like nothing was wrong. Lips against my mouth, hands on the best places, whispering all the right things.

The next morning, she was gone.

At first I wasn't worried. She'd left before, without warning. Gone away, then came back in a few days, a week, two. She'd be back. She always came back.

Except she didn't.

Cop in me started trying to figure it out. She'd left all her things behind, abandoned her skycar near the starport. The only things missing were one set of clothes, her purse, and her omni-tool. Had to be foul play. Had to be.

Couldn't have been her making good on all those playful suggestions that she'd be leaving soon. Couldn't have been her finally getting tired of the broken-down turian and moving on. Couldn't be that there wasn't a single thing in that life that she valued enough to take with her.

It took me far longer than it should have to work it out. She was a little over three hundred, the prime of her life. I was just another brief stop on a thousand year journey.

Seventeen years, on and off. Sometimes together, sometimes not. Sometimes we fought, sometimes we made up. Sometimes I swallowed my pride and apologized, sometimes she just wandered back in like nothing happened.

Seventeen years, and none of it mattered.

I crumpled the photo in my hand, stood, and threw my glass across the room. It shattered, spilled what was left of its contents. A perfect waste of good whiskey. I didn't care. Sank right back into the chair and reached down for the cheap bottle.

I didn't bother getting another glass.

* * *

 

I was still in the chair when I woke up. My mouth tasted like ash and my head was starting to hurt. I didn't know what time it was, it was still dark out, but since I had the beginnings of a hangover, I guessed it must have been late. I rubbed at my eyes with the pads of my fingers, pushed myself to my feet and stumbled for the bathroom, knocking over the mostly-empty bottle on my way.

The fluorescent piping around the mirror flickered on when I flipped the switch and nearly blinded me. I shut it off and decided to take my chances fumbling in the dark instead. A splash of cold water on my face woke me up some, but didn't help the headache. Took a washcloth off the rack and wet it, rubbed on the back of my neck.

I was starting to feel better until I looked up and caught a glimpse of my reflection in the mirror. Even in the dim twilight of a hotel bathroom, turian vision is better than you'd think. I wanted to put my fist through the glass, curl up in the bed I hadn't touched yet, and sleep until four in the afternoon.

It was a good, solid plan. But there was something I needed to decide first.

I walked back into the living area and searched the ground until I found it. I straightened the picture as best I could, smoothed it against the wood floor. I knelt there, staring at it. Trying to figure out what I wanted to do with it.

That's when I saw the light shining under the bottom of the front door. And the shadows of two sets of feet.

I pushed myself up and crept closer as quietly as I could. The walls were thin enough that I could hear voices.

"You sure he's still in there?"

"Positive. I heard him walking around a minute ago."

Great, I thought. Fucking great. This couldn't end anywhere good.

"I don't hear nothin'."

"Then tell the others while I prep the door. Let's get this barefaced son of a bitch."

I hate being right.

I pinched the bridge of my nose hard, tried to sober myself as best I could, and considered what I had. A bunch of broken glass, some chairs and tables I could barricade with. Windows, if I felt like jumping fifteen stories and taking up permanent residence between the cracks in the sidewalk. My omni-tool.

My fucking omni-tool. I grabbed at my wrist and momentarily panicked before I spun around and saw it sitting on the table. I tried to be fast and quiet and only really succeeded at the former as I pulled it on, keyed up the offensive protocols, and started analyzing my options.

I'm ashamed to say it took me a solid minute to rig something up. In my defense, I had killed two large bottles of hard liquor that night and slept poorly for the last three days.

When the shape charge they planted on the door finally exploded and it fell inward, two of them rushed in. I got a good look at two more flanking the door before they tripped the proximity mine I'd fabricated and planted on the wall. Of course, if they had shields, that wouldn't be enough. Which is why I'd plugged the sink and let it overflow, coating the floor around the door and kitchen in water. And then generated a localized electric shock using my omni-tool from behind the counter.

Turns out, they didn't expect resistance from a scarred up vet past his prime, and they didn't have any personal shields. Odds were they were dead before I sent fifty thousand volts through their bodies, and the whole thing was overkill.

Felt good, though. Even if the smell afterward was less than pleasant.

"Spirits," I heard one of them curse. I peeked out and saw him almost rush headlong into the exact same water trap as his friends, but the other one at the door stopped him. He stuck his head out and I couldn't get a good look at his face or markings. Not that it mattered much.

"Give it up!" he shouted into the dark. "We've got you outnumbered and outgunned!"

"Oh yeah?" I started flipping through secondary defense protocols, omni-blade programs and close range stunners. "How would you know?"

"Because even if you get past us, you won't make it past the rest!" the first one taunted. I heard an audible smack and smiled as I imagined his partner cuffing him upside the head.

"Really?" Picked two. Forked omni-blade with incendiary application, and contact-explosive generated across the knuckles, just in case. "And where are they?"

"Everywhere!" The smarter one again. "You're not leaving his building alive."

I keyed up the proximity mine protocol, overclocked it, reprogrammed it to work on a timer, and started the fabrication process. The Arbiter had the mine in the palm of my hand inside of three seconds. Thank the spirits of the Serrice Council Technology Conglomerate.

"We taking bets?" I said as I threw the mine into my bedroom.

"Only with your life!" the dumb one yelled.

I grinned like an idiot and got up on my haunches. "Good stakes."

Once I started sprinting, they opened fire. I heard the rounds hit the door frame and ducked my head, and as the wall above my bed exploded, I leapt through the hole my jury-rigged shape charge had created.

I think it says a lot about how much I drank and where my head was at that I didn't consider that the room next to mine would be occupied. Thank the spirits it wasn't. I rolled off the bed into the hotel room that was a mirror image of my own, and made for the front door, hacking it open with a few twitches of my fingers across the haptic interface of the omni-tool.

The pair of stooges were right behind me, but they weren't bluffing when they said there were more. I stormed out into the hallway and nearly collided with one of them, a tall man with pale markings. I didn't have time to fabricate the blade, so I went with the gel. The left hook to the jaw sent him careening into the wall, mandible hanging loose and broken on his face. He might have been dead, I couldn't be sure, but I was certain that my hand hurt like all hell. I grabbed the weapon he'd held, some submachine gun I didn't recognize the model of, and sprayed behind me.

The two from before nearly ran into my fire, but once again the smart one was quick on the take, and held the other one back. I backed up, nearly tripped on the legs of the tall man, and made for the elevators.

I wasn't drunk enough to think leaving out the front door was a good idea, or stupid enough not to know they'd hack the thing the moment I stepped inside. Instead, I pressed the button for down, then hacked the door myself as I kept my gun trained on where I'd come from. When the doors slid open, I turned and leapt across the shaft.

I'd worked a few bomb threats on hotels before. I knew the service layouts by heart, because we'd had to search them, top to bottom, a full three times before we could clear the building for reentry. That was protocol. So I knew how the elevators worked, where they went, and every maintenance shaft and platform attached to them.

Again, it was colossally stupid. I didn't recognize this hotel, and I hadn't been in this city in more than thirty years, post-war. I had no idea if they'd use the same building guidelines as they used to. Yet, somehow, my luck was holding out, and I managed to land cleanly on the service ladder as the doors slid shut behind me.

I stuck the SMG in the crook of my cowl and started to slide down as fast as I could, trying to look forward and not down, and stay focused on not letting go of the ladder. I stopped every few seconds to make sure I wasn't about to hit the ground or the elevator, which sped promptly upward, then descended as quickly, sheathed in the blue light of a mass effect field that lit the shaft long enough for me to realize how long a fall I'd enjoy if I slipped.

When I found a maintenance crawlspace close to what was marked as the second floor, I got inside and shimmied through the tight quarters as fast as I could. It led into a small chamber barely big enough to stand in, with access panels for the major heating and cooling systems, and several other crawlspaces leading in multiple directions, including up and down.

I headed down. I ran into one more of the small chambers and still kept going. Ended up kicking out a vent cover and hopping out into the sub-basement.

Vallum was an old city. You wouldn't know it to look at it now, of course, but it's been around for centuries. Millennia, even. They'd built and rebuilt the city numerous times long before Facinus or the Reapers razed it to the ground. There weren't exactly ruins underneath—no one cared enough about the history of Taetrus to preserve anything more than a couple hundred years—but there were a labyrinthine network of tunnels that the city's utilities and service workers had co-opted. Most lead to dead ends or cave-ins, but the ones that didn't were lined with cables and pipes the width of a man's cowl, and nearly every major building in the city center had access to them.

And, of course, they were regularly patrolled by cops and militia, and updated maps were issued to every officer. Not that I wanted to run into either, but with any luck, once my new friends from up above figured out where I'd gone, they'd think twice before coming down after me.

I couldn't remember this section of the tunnels, and I didn't have a map. I just ran, made a few corners, found an access point with a ladder, and climbed up before a patrol happened upon me.

It lead to an alley. No idea where I was anymore, but anywhere outside was good. After I climbed out, I tried to figure out which way the starport was. Maybe I could get an emergency shuttle off this shithole.

"Pstt," hissed a voice behind me.

And, like an idiot, I turned around and met the butt of the rifle with my face.

I should have known they'd have men watching the nearby exits. But I was too drunk and too high on adrenaline to think more than one step ahead.

Humans say it's better to be lucky than good. What a crock of shit that is, huh?


	5. Too Little, Too Late

I came to slowly and uncomfortably, tasting blood in my mouth. Once I realized I was conscious, I made note of two things: I was sitting in a chair, and I was naked.

My hands were bound behind the chair's back, at the wrists. My ankles and spurs were strapped to the legs, and when I shifted my weight, I found the chair bolted to the floor.

The situation only became worse when I opened my eyes and saw a concrete floor beneath my feet, stained an ominous blue.

The only light in the room was a bright lamp hanging above my head. Beyond the cone it projected, it was dark, but from what I could make out, I was in a big room, long and wide, with a low ceiling. Failing concrete and corroded metal. Probably a sub-basement. No windows, one door, manually operated with a sliding handle. Nothing but rubble and rebar on the floor, save for the small table just beyond the light and the man examining its contents.

"Good," he said simply. "You're awake."

I almost spoke, but decided to hold my tongue. Thought I'd let him talk first.

The man picked up something small and slender from the table and held it up, considering it. Then, seemingly satisfied, he turned and walked into the light. He was tall and thin. Barefaced, with grey plates and long, drooping mandibles. His eyes were small and beady, but opened wide.

He squatted to meet my eyes, elbows on his knees. "I had hoped to speak with you before I began. I hate to do things unnecessarily."

He paused, and looked at me strangely. Searchingly.

"Where am I?" I finally asked, not surprised at how my voice cracked. I knew I must be in the early stages of dehydration.

He shook his head. "Try again."

I swallowed, visibly and with no small effort, then asked, "Who are you?"

"No one important," he said calmly. "There was a woman with you earlier tonight, yes? What did you talk about?"

I said nothing. His eyes kept scanning my face, my fringe, my throat and cowl. Finally, he met my gaze, and that's when I knew I was going to die.

There's a look a man gets when he's done things he's not proud of. You saw it a lot in the military. On the frontline soldiers, on the generals who sent men to die, but especially on the interrogators. The ones who had to extract information. The ones who had to break a person down piece by piece, until there was nothing left. When they looked at you, they weren't really seeing you—they saw your eyes, your mouth, your plates and fringe and hands and bones. A series of parts, never a whole.

Because if they saw all of you, they might recognize that you were a real person. And they couldn't live with doing what they did to a real person.

The barefaced man was looking at me like he was about to carve a roast and couldn't quite decide where to start.

"Who do you work for?" I asked slowly.

"Ahh," he said, staring at my nose. "Finally, an intelligent question. You are the guest of Vigilus."

"And who is that?"

He smiled the ghost of a smile, mandibles flickering. "You really don't know?"

"Assume I don't."

"Vigilus is not a person," he explained. "It is an organization of concerned citizens with a common goal."

"That being?"

He tilted his head. "Order. In this most unruly place, it is the only goal worth fighting for." He leaned forward, focusing on one of my mandibles. "This woman you were with, did she say anything to you about where she lived? Where she worked?"

I blinked slowly. Parthus' voice had been bouncing around my head all day, but now, I recalled something else he'd said to me.

_This city has enough vigilante garbage without off-worlders coming here and adding to it._

"Vigilantes," I said aloud.

The bareface hummed. "A loaded word, but yes, in a sense."

"In a sense?" I hissed. "You send men to try and kill me because, what, I spoke with someone?"

"If our younger members were a little... overenthusiastic, then I apologize. Their orders were to bring you here alive, that we might speak with you."

I actually laughed a little, shaking my head at the floor. The bareface didn't seem to care.

"But you must understand they were upset," he continued. "After all, you killed two of our youngest the other day."

My head jerked up. He was smiling again, that eerie smile that came nowhere near his eyes.

"And now you begin to understand, Mr. Sartorus."

"How do you—"

"This woman," he cut off. "Did she mention any ties she might have had in the city? Any friends? Or family?"

It all clicked into place, too little, too late. They'd been watching me since I left the station. They'd watched me all day, watched me with her, watched me take her to a hotel and watched her walk out alone.

But if it was her they were after, why hadn't they taken her?

Maybe they had. Maybe she was already dead. Or worse.

And because of what? Because she'd gone to a few protests? Said the wrong things in front of the wrong people? Because she thought things should be better than they were?

The man was still speaking. Distantly, I heard him say, "It would be quite a feather in Facinus' fringe if they were to attract an upstanding businessman like yourself to their cause. The owner of one of the larger construction firms in Nos Astra, I'm told. 'Tytanus Heavy Industries.' The name is a pseudonym of yours, is it not?"

I blinked. He leaned in closer, and asked, "Are you here to meet with separatists?"

"No," I ground out through clenched teeth.

He tilted his head the other way, considering my right eye.

"Then what is your purpose here on Taetrus, Mr. Sartorus?"

The question hung between us. I answered the only way I could—I bared my teeth and clicked my jaw.

The bareface didn't even blink. Instead, he reached up and grasped my chin, jerking my head left, then right.

"I think," he said thoughtfully, "we'll ignore the face for now."

He released my chin and I jerked away. Then he raised the knife in his hands. Small and sharp and almost certainly medical. There was something on the blade, some liquid shine that wasn't blood and wasn't water and I knew it couldn't be anything good.

"Let's start out," he said, standing and walking behind me, "and work our way in."

Thin lines of fire arced across my palms and fingers, then my wrists. And as they burned, they grew hotter and hotter, searing and twisting. I caught the first scream in my throat, but not the second.

Fast-acting poison on the blade, was the last coherent thought I had for a while.

* * *

 

Eight thousand, three hundred, ninety one. Ninety two. Ninety three.

I told him everything.

I told him her name, but he already knew it. I told him her record, her arrests, and he knew that too. I told him about her parents. About where she grew up. How she took her kava, what her favorite beer was, what salad dressing she used. I recited entire conversations word for word, over and over and over again.

But he kept asking the wrong questions. Who were her friends? What were her plans? Where was she going when she left my hotel? What did she know about local gang activity? Did she know anyone else in the city?

I didn't know. I told him so. He didn't look like he believed me any more than he did when I told him she smelled like wildflowers.

So it continued.

Eight thousand, three hundred, ninety seven. Ninety eight. Ninety nine.

There was a pipe somewhere behind me. It dripped at a regular interval, once every three seconds, thereabouts. There was no clock and no window, the only light hung above my head, and it never went out. So I counted the drops as a way to tell how long I'd been down there. How long between each session. It was a pointless mental exercise, but it occupied me. I had no delusions about escape. Not in the condition I was in. Maybe I wasn't that far past my prime, but all that time in the private sector had made me soft. I just wasn't the man I used to be. And even he wasn't up to much.

There had been three sessions so far. He kept me conscious throughout the first, only letting me pass out once he was finished. I woke to find an IV in my arm and medi-gel on the cuts covering my arms and torso. He was even stingier with it than the cops had been, barely enough to stem the flow of blood. But he clearly wasn't done with me yet.

It was two thousand, six hundred, sixty three drops before the door opened again and he walked in with a fresh set of tools. He began to lay them out on the small table just outside the light while I whimpered and mewled like a child, begging and pleading. He didn't listen, or if he did, he didn't care.

I've heard stories of interrogators listening to music while they worked, trying to take their mind off what they were doing. I never saw him with earbuds or a visor, and there was never any sound but the steady drip of the pipe behind me.

So the next time he showed up, I didn't say anything. Didn't whine or beg or cry. I knew it was a wasted effort. The man was a professional monster, and he was very good at his job. When I passed out as he was attempting to pry off my pectoral plates with a sharp chisel, he allowed me the courtesy of unconsciousness while he finished.

I awoke again to the sound of the pipe, and medi-gel coated bandages across my chest where he'd reattached them. Still not done with me yet.

Eight thousand, four hundred, thirty one. Thirty two. Thirty three.

Eventually, I thought, fuck it. What does it matter? A few more sessions, they'll be convinced I don't know anything, put a bullet in my head, and dump the body somewhere. Maybe space it. Or use my status as a fine, upstanding businessman to their advantage and pin my murder on the separatists. That seemed appropriate.

The door opened. I didn't have to look up to know who it was. He laid his tools on the table, examined each, and selected one, then strode into the light.

"I think we'll start from the bottom up this time," he said, kneeling in front of me. "Perhaps we'll even reach your face."

I saw him rev up the kinetic drill and brace my toes against the floor with his boot. He was about to drive it home when he jerked upright. The drill whined down.

I looked up to find him staring at the door. After about ten seconds, by the number of drips from the pipe, he slowly turned back to my feet. He revved the drill again, lowered it...

This time I heard the bang from outside the room. He dropped the drill and it landed next to my foot. Strode over to the table and grabbed something else, then stepped to the side of the door, back against the wall. For a long moment, we both waited patiently.

Silence. Thirty drips worth.

My interrogator shifted what I realized must be a pistol to his left hand—I wondered absently if he had always brought it, or if this was to be our last session—while he slowly reached for the handle of the door with his right.

The shotgun blast took most of it clean off along with the door's handle, spraying blue blood and white bone in my general direction. The bareface let out a choked scream and fell back against the wall as the door was kicked out of its frame and two turians in armor and helmets stormed in.

One of them spun and trained his shotgun on the bareface, who dropped his gun and raised his hands. Or rather, one hand. The ruined stump of the other was cradled against his stomach.

"Oh," the one in front of me said. "Oh sweet spirits, no."

The one with the gun turned and looked at me. I heard a sharp intake of breath through the helmet mic. He turned back to my interrogator, who slowly lowered his hand and seemed to know what was coming as the first shotgun blast caught him full in the chest and sent him to the ground. He lived for another few seconds, gurgling and choking on his own blood, as his attacker slapped in another heatsink and stood above his head. The last round pulped his skull and stained the floor for a solid meter.

"Help me with the restraints," said the one in front of me, voice clipped. She grabbed the kinetic drill next to my feet and started to strip off the metal cuffs holding me to the chair.

The other strode over, blue spatter staining the front of his yellow armor. He stared at me. "Spirits... are you sure he's—"

"Help me!"

The other strode behind me and I felt him start to work at the bindings on my hands and wrists. My half-lidded eyes started to drift shut. It had been a while since I'd passed out last, and my interrogator hadn't seen fit to give me another IV in almost five thousand drips.

"Hey," said the one in front, green armor. "Stay with me. Come on, hurry up!"

"I'm trying! Shit, he's cut to shreds..."

A third voice called out from the doorway. "Taking too long. We need to go. Now."

My head lolled forward and I blacked out for a moment. Then another. Things started to blur. The one in green suddenly didn't have a helmet, and she was holding my face in her hands. I heard her voice, strong and lilting, and it sounded so far away.

"Damn it, Sor!" Amina shouted. "Don't do this! Stay with me!"

I started to convulse before I blacked out completely. I don't know if I was laughing or sobbing.


	6. Appreciate the Sympathy

I faded in and out of consciousness for a while. Blurry, indistinct images kept floating around me. Colors shifting and twisting, blue and green and silver. Blood and metal and skin.

I remember people speaking. To me. About me. I tried to reply and it came out in a mumble. Don't even know what I said.

Last clear thing I do remember is a hand squeezing mine. I squeezed back, because I needed something to hold on to while I blacked out one last time.

Over the last few days, I'd spent a lot of time waking up in unfamiliar places, so when I started to regain consciousness, the fact that I didn't recognize where I was didn't bother me as much as it probably should have.

Even with my eyes closed, I knew it wasn't right. It wasn't the chair I'd spent spirits know how long in. It wasn't my hotel room. It was too cold, and that bed had better sheets. And it wasn't my apartment, because that bed had worse sheets.

Which meant it was someplace new. Great, I thought. Let's open our eyes and see what new wonders Taetrus has in store for us.

It wasn't bright, but the lights in the room were blinding. No idea how long I'd been out. Felt like over a day, from the ache in my muscles. Took stock of myself. Something stuck in the back of my hand. An IV, probably. Six fingers, four toes. All accounted for. Flexed both my mandibles. Still attached. Breathed deep and slow. Sore, but not painful. I could work with that.

I opened my eyes again, more slowly. Let my eyes get used to the light. Found a mobile bed on wheels, off-white sheets, and a plastic curtain on a rail, pulled shut. The rail itself looked new, and the fluorescents had been hastily installed in the ceiling. Which itself looked like it had seen better days, with its yellowing tiles.

Took a couple attempts to sit up, a solid minute of rest after that burst of activity, then a couple more attempts to slide my legs out of the bed and stand. But I made it. I was naked from the waist up, covered in bandages, and felt like I'd been cut up and stitched back together from my head to my toes, but I was standing on my own. It wasn't much, but that was something.

I took one step and nearly fell to my knees. The universe's response to my sudden burst of confidence.

I yanked out the IV, pulled back the curtain and made for the wall, using it for support. The room itself wasn't exactly pristine. Looked like the sort of almost-there attempt at a sterile hospital room that you saw a lot in the military. They probably stitched me up in here, under the bright fluorescent lights.

They. Had a bad feeling about 'they.'

Checked the door, found it unlocked. Either I wasn't a prisoner, or they didn't think I'd be in any state to get out. Didn't much care either way, since I wasn't about to go anywhere. Even if I made it out of here without anyone noticing, where ever 'here' was, I wouldn't get far before I passed out. Would be a pretty ignoble end to survive everything else only to die of exposure in some Taetran ditch.

But that didn't mean I was just going to lay around until whoever it was deigned to tell me what the hell was going on. So I opened the door and, keeping one hand on the wall, stepped outside my room.

Plain corridor. Cream-colored walls, tiled floor. Several other doors. Halls leading left and right, with more corridors branching off. No guard, no sign of anyone. No traffic noise either, so I was probably underground. Turned right and started walking, slowly and haltingly.  Figured if I ran into anyone, that'd answer my questions. In the meantime, I'd have a look around.

Saw one door half-open at the end of the corridor, where two more split in opposite directions. Made the journey to the opposite wall without falling, then slid open the unpowered door.

It was a conference room. Or it had been, once. Long table, high-backed chairs. Dusty and rotten and old. The far wall was nothing but glass, giving me a grand view of the sun sinking behind Vallum's distant, unremarkable skyline.

Turned out I was about fifteen stories up, in some old, abandoned high-rise in one of Vallum's suburbs. One of those jobs the city financed in a vain attempt to attract businesses to the area. Like all anyone was waiting for to set up shop in Vallum was a fancy building to do it in.

Well. At least now I knew where I was, for all the good it did.  I turned around and stuck to the wall, walking along the corridor. If I kept to one side, I'd at least be able to figure out the size and shape of the place. Have a floor plan and a perimeter to work with. Not sure what I'd do with that information, exactly, but it was a thing to do until I found someone. Or until someone found me.

Made it far enough around the floor to figure out a few things–the building wasn't symmetrical, for one. It was a long rectangle with a prong at the end. The other was that most of the floor lacked power, doors and lights alike, save for a few rooms.

I was outside of one of them when I heard voices.

"Call." Female. No one I recognized.

"Shit," cursed another. Male. "Should have known."

"Damnation, woman," said a third. Older. Sounded like he came from out east. "You could at least try to go easy on us."

"I'm not your nurse maid, Jar," the woman said. "You want to be coddled, go somewhere else."

"You know any good places?" the old man asked. "Could always use a good coddlin'. Right, boys?"

A chorus of loud agreements. Sounded like more than who'd spoken so far. The woman seemed more amused than insulted.

"I find a woman willing to 'coddle' any of you, I'm telling her to run as fast as she can." Laughter. "Now somebody deal the cards, already."

Thought about opening the door and asking to join the game, see how many looks I got. Whatever happened, it would certainly answer most of my questions.

Decided against it, and shuffled past. Smart, stupid, or just plain stubborn, take your pick, but I wouldn't turn myself in until I'd at least made a circuit of the building.

Discovered a few other things by the time I was near the empty conference room again. The few powered doors were locked and keyed, you needed an omni-tool to access them. There were a number of wires and cables strung across the ceiling, going up through the tiles at times. Which meant that unless they had access to kilometers of high-density fiber-optic cables, they probably had the generators somewhere on this floor too. Or maybe they were siphoning power off of the main grid somehow. I wasn't sure.

I was sure I was getting damned tired, though. Stomach was roiling, though I hadn't eaten in what felt like days, and I had a growing pain across my back and chest where the bandages itched. Painkillers in the medi-gel wearing off.

I was strongly considering passing out in the hallway for someone to find when a door opened in front of me and a man walked out. Too young, no more than twenty, and half-clad in light armor and plainclothes. He cursed loudly when he saw me and his right hand jumped down to his hip. He didn't pull the gun, but the reaction told me more than enough.

He seemed to relax a little when he saw I was leaning heavily against the wall with one arm wrapped around my stomach. "Oh," he said, "it's you."

I gave him my most morbid grin. "Yeah," I said hoarsely, "it's me."

The boy blinked rapidly and then started to back away, holding one hand out. "Uh, stay here. Okay? Just... stay here."

He turned and jogged down the corridor and took a right, towards the interior.

I laughed a little, and it hurt. Stay here, he said. Like I had a choice.

Slumped and waiting against the wall, I tried to relax. I'd been found. Only a matter of minutes now. Then I could have another nice period of unconsciousness. Maybe I'd wake up somewhere new. Hopefully some place with nicer sheets. And cold drinks. And some decent smokes.

Indulging in that pointless little fantasy while I scratched at my bandages killed time until the boy returned with someone in tow. When I saw them turn the corner, my heart leapt straight into my throat before promptly plummeting down past my stomach.

She didn't have the feathers in her fringe anymore, and her trim green coat had been replaced with the same patchwork of light armor and plain drab fatigues that the boy had. Her eyes were hard and tinged with worry.

"Spirits alive, Sor," Amina said as she rushed up to my side. "What the hell are you doing out here?"

I opened my mouth to ask her something similar and coughed instead, which hurt, which caused more coughing, which hurt more.

"Damn it," she cursed quietly as she slung one of my arms over her shoulders. She turned to the boy and barked, "Get another IV and fresh bandages and bring them to his room. Now."

"Got it," he said, nodding furiously before sprinting down the corridor and out of sight.

Amina half-carried me to my room, and I didn't attempt to speak until we were alone again. She sat me down on the edge of my makeshift hospital bed and sighed as she looked me over.

"You weren't supposed to be walking around yet," she said mildly, as much to herself as to me. "Pulled some of these open again."

I looked down at the faint blue spots beginning to erupt across my chest. When I looked up, she'd gotten a flask from somewhere and was holding it out for me. I stared at it for a bit before I took it and popped it open.

"You can't leave your bed like this again," she warned as I chugged what tasted like cold tea. "Not until you're healed."

I swallowed and took a breath. Then I looked her in the eye. "I appreciate the sympathy."

The way she looked at me before she turned her head told me everything. I had known since I woke up–the memories of my final moments in that chair weren't something you forget–but knowing something and having it confirmed are two very different things, and it felt like a punch to the gut all the same.

"Guess I never had to worry back at the station," I said. "You're a far better liar than I knew."

"I didn't lie to you," she said, barely arguing and still refusing to look at me.

"'I sympathize with the cause. That's all.' "

"It's the truth."

"Sympathizers don't wear armor and guns. Sympathizers don't have a safe house."

"Then you should be grateful that I'm not," she said, glaring at me. "If I were 'just a sympathizer,' you'd be dead."

We stared at each other, stiff and silent, until the door opened and the boy burst in with an armful of medical kit.

"Got everything, I think," he said, setting it down on the foot of the bed. "Do you... need any help? Or–"

"I'm fine, Kad." Amina gave him a pointed look as she opened the kit. "Go."

The boy shot a warning glance at me before nodding and leaving the room, shutting the door behind him.

"Boy worries about you," I said.

Amina scoffed. "Kad worries about everyone."

She straightened, a pair of sharp medical scissors in her hands. I visibly flinched, and the hard look in her eyes softened instantly. She took a great amount of care in drawing closer to me, trying to be as non-threatening as possible, and I still had to fight every urge to shove her away when she started to cut the bandages around my chest.

I assume Amina noticed, because she started to talk as she unwound the long strip of cloth. "Figured you'd be glad," she said, forcing some levity. "You've still got a very threatening presence."

She had to draw her arms around me with every revolution. I could still smell wildflowers, buried beneath antiseptic and gunmetal. It didn't hurt quite so much when I laughed quietly.

"Yeah, right. Thanks."

"Hey, a lot of guys would love to be threatening." Her mouth was right next to my ear. "Better than boring, anyway."

I rumbled something in the back of my throat. "I don't know about that."

Amina pulled away and I hissed as she began to peel off the sterile pad on my chest. It was definitely bleeding again, a pair of weeping scabs along the top in particular. But while I'd have a few nice scars, my pectoral plates were still attached. I was more relieved about that than I thought I would be. Figured my vanity had gone along with my fringe.

She took a small, clear bag of medi-gel and punched a hole into it with her talon, then spread it out along the length of a new pad and press it into the cuts. The painkillers went to work, and I didn't realize how bad it had been until it was gone. I practically slumped forward into her arms.

"Hey," she said gently, hands squeezing my shoulders. "No sleeping. I'm not done yet."

I grinned stupidly against her shoulder. "Not the first time I've heard that from a woman."

She slapped my shoulder. "Spirits..." she sighed, then drew her arms around me again. I felt the pain as she removed the pads on my back, but distantly. I was well on my way to passing out again.

After she'd managed to replace the bandage, with some difficulty thanks to my uncooperative body, she wrapped up my torso with another length of linen and lowered me gently to the bed. I made the cursory effort of lifting my legs up, but at this point the only thing keeping me awake was her proximity.

"There's another IV here," she said, too close to my face. "You can't eat yet, so..."

"Uh-huh," I mumbled, looking into her eyes.

"Are you..." She blinked. "Do you... want me to stay?"

I wasn't operating at a hundred percent, but even if I was, I imagine that would have been a tough question to answer. I swallowed and tried to keep my eyes open long enough to give it some thought.

"Do what you want."

Her eyes flickered over my face. She straightened up, and I blinked once, twice, then couldn't open them again. I felt her raise up my arm, tape the tube to it, heard her hang the bag on the IV stand and the soft drip-drip of the saline, and then I was out.

Thought I might have heard the door open and close, but it might have been my imagination. Not sure which makes me feel worse.


	7. No Way Out But Down

It had been a long time since I dreamed about her. Blue skin, bone white markings, the sweep of her crest, the curve of her hip. Colors contrasting and shifting, blurring, white into green. She smiled at me. Turned and walked away, kept walking even as I followed, but I couldn't keep up. She got so far away I couldn't see her anymore. Tried to call her name and I couldn't. Realized I didn't know which one to call.

I woke up feeling sorry for myself. It was getting to be a habit.

Opened my eyes to the same drab, makeshift hospital room I had woken up in previously. Empty but for me.

Felt sore all over, but better. Didn't hurt to sit up, bandages itched but looked clean. Mouth was a bit dry and I was hungry as a starving varren, but for once, I didn't feel like I was on the edge of consciousness or death. Small victories, I guess.

I was about to stand up and check around for some clothes when the door opened.

"Oh," Amina said, brow plates rising. "Good timing. I was about to wake you."

There was a tray in her hands. "Tell me that's food."

"Depends on if you consider bad take-out 'food.' "

I beckoned her eagerly with one hand. She smirked a little and set the tray on the foot of the bed, taking a seat in the single chair by my side.

For a few minutes I was too busy inhaling the pre-packaged krysae, bottled tea and freshly seared mushrooms to talk, so she filled the silence and I did my best to listen.

"It's the eighth of the month, Galactic Standard. You've been out for nearly three days, missing for three more. It was... touch and go, for a while. We have a couple trained field medics, but this place was never exactly set up to be a hospital. And no, I can't tell you where you are. Not exactly."

She reached over and touched my arm briefly, drawing my gaze away from the tray. She looked startlingly sad. "What I can tell is that you're safe. Nobody's going to hurt you. I promise."

Seeing her eyes, hearing her voice, harmonics laced with something muted and indistinct, I could almost believe her.

"So why am I here?" I asked bluntly. "If you were just concerned about my health, you could have dropped me at the door of an emergency room and left."

"And Vigilus would have come for you there, too."

"The police–"

"They are the police," she said, shaking her head. "The police, the militia, the fucking fire brigade... damn near every high-ranking official in this city looks the other way when Vigilus acts."

I peered at her skeptically, chewing on a particularly tough strip of krysae flesh. "So this was all for my protection."

She exhaled a breath that might have been a sigh. "You should talk to Fyr."

"Fyr, huh?" I turned back to my tray, picking at the mushrooms with a dull plastic skewer. "He lead this little outfit?"

"He does."

I popped a mushroom into my mouth and paused a moment. Then I shrugged. "He can wait until I'm finished."

I took my sweet time with the meal, my first in spirits knew how long. I'd lost a few pounds in that chair and was more than a little malnourished, but the IVs had helped, and apart from some soreness and fatigue, I wasn't in too bad a shape. Apart from the scars.

Took the opportunity to collect my thoughts and let myself get used to being awake and alert again. Amina kept fidgeting in her chair. She clearly had something she wanted to say, but whatever it was, I wasn't up for dragging it out of her, so I let it drop. For now.

When I was finished, I swung my legs out of the bed and stood. Amina was beside me, a hand near my elbow, but I didn't waver. I rolled my head around my neck and heard the vertebrae pop.

"Don't suppose you have any clothes in here?" I asked with a groan, rolling my shoulders.

"Don't want to put on a show, huh?" she asked, feigning disappointment. "That's too bad."

I furrowed my browplates and my mandibles clacked softly against my face. She laughed a little. "Alright. I'll be back."

She left and I paced the room, taking in the sorry state of it and stretching my legs as best I could for a lazy middle-aged torture victim. By the time she returned with an armful of clothing, I was feeling more alive than I had in days.

"Here you go," she said. "One set of civvies. And don't get all modest on me now, just put 'em on."

I mumbled something about being leered at but did as I was told, stripped off the plain white pants I'd been wearing and threw on the civvies over my beaten-up old hide. They were a bit loose, and the fashion sense was questionable at best–who wears shirts with ribbed elbows anymore?–but I wasn't about to complain.

I was feeling almost turian again when I turned around and Amina handed me something I wasn't expecting.

"Found it in the same place we found you," she explained as I ran my fingers over the leather. "Guess one of them knew a good thing when he saw it."

The faint smell of spent heat sinks still clung to it. I threw it on and while my bandages complained, I didn't care.

"Thank you," I said as sincerely as I could. "Means a lot."

Amina grinned and crossed her arms. "Didn't figure you for the sentimental type."

I grinned back. "Then why take the jacket?"

"Maybe I hoped I was wrong," she replied with a shrug.

I felt the bandages against my hide and saw the thin civex breastplate she wore as casually as her forest green coat, and the urge to laugh died in my throat.

"Don't suppose you grabbed my omni-tool while you were at it?" I asked experimentally.

The smile on her face dimmed as quickly. "I did. You can talk to Fyr about getting it back."

"Well," I said, sticking my hands in my pockets, "no time like the present."

She turned and led me out of the room and down the hall. I remembered enough from my little venture around the building that I knew roughly where she was going–there was a collection of powered doors on the northern side of the building–but I kept behind her and let her lead.

The doors themselves were clearly not part of the original construction—they'd had to cut into the walls to install them. Big and heavy and looked like they could withstand most military-grade small explosives. It would be easier to blow a hole through the walls themselves, but I imagined they had contingencies for that, too. Lined certain rooms with blast shielding, maybe.

Amina led me to a door at the center of a hall, lifted her hand and tapped out a pattern on her omni-tool that I caught about half of. There was a noise like a heavy metal bolt slamming from somewhere on the other side, and the door slid open.

It had to be their command center. Longer and wider than the other conference room I'd seen. Set in the interior of the building, so no windows. Terminals sat open along the walls on cheap, hastily assembled desks. Screens blinked with scan lines as the holoprojectors in the walls flickered, providing the only real light. Datapads and thermal clips and the occasional weapon mod littered every available surface, including the massive table in the center. A map of the city and another projection of the skyline itself glowed blue as a small crowd of men and women gathered around it.

"It's a risk," I heard one of them say. Maybe the old one from the card game. Jar.

"It's always a risk," replied another. He had his back to us, hands pressed flat against the table. Something sounded strange in his voice.

Amina stepped forward. "Fyr."

He pushed away from the table and turned. Looked around forty, maybe. Tall, broad shoulders. Silver plates dulled with wear but retaining a faint shine, complimented by vibrant red Vallum markings. Shorter mandibles, fitting flush against his face. Long, sharp fringe.

If it weren't for the gaping hole where his right eye should have been, he would have been a handsome man. As it was, it looked like someone had taken a marble statue and smashed it with a hammer. Cracks sprayed out from the plain metal plate that he'd placed over the hole, and even without seeing the scar itself, I could tell it was a bad one. I had seen people take slivers of shrapnel that had left them brain-damaged, comatose, or dead. This man had clearly taken more than a sliver.

"Mr. Sartorus," he said, smoothly flanging voice marred by a lack of resonance in the harmonics. Sounded like whatever had taken his eye might have taken one of his voice boxes as well. "You look well."

"Well enough."

"Good." He extended a hand. "Fyrran Exar."

There was a long moment's consideration, staring at his hand, before I pulled my hand from my pocket and shook it. His grip was a bit stronger than was necessary, but not enough to hurt. His one eye regarded me coolly.

I glanced around the table at the gathered crowd. A dozen, maybe, in various combinations of armor, fatigues, and plainclothes. All staring at me, but deferring to him. It wasn't lost on me that outside of myself, Fyr, and the old one called Jar, there wasn't a single person here born before the war.

I wasn't naked and strapped to a chair, but in that moment, I felt just as trapped. Just as helpless.

Message received, I thought with a grimace as he released my hand. Loud and clear.

"This my 'so glad you're alive' party?" I asked dryly.

To my surprise, he smiled. "Something akin to that."

"Uh-huh." I looked over at Amina, who had moved closer to Fyr. "Don't suppose you did this out of the kindness of your hearts."

She frowned, and almost spoke, but Fyr cut her off. "Truth be told," he said, turning his own eye to her, "her appeal carries weight. Amina is not a friend easily made."

Something undefinable passed between them then, and it took a moment for it to sink in. We had barely exchanged words, but I already knew what kind of man Fyrran Exar was. He would never have risked his people for a total stranger, unless...

I ground my teeth and smiled tightly. "She certainly isn't, is she."

The one-eyed man turned his attention to me. "That being said, you might do us a kindness before you leave."

"Why should I?"

"Beyond the fact that you owe us your life?" Fyrran smiled again, less kindly. His right mandible seemed to have a little more trouble at it. "You left quite a mess at your hotel. I don't imagine you'd make it off-world before the police—or Vigilus—got a hold of you again.

"And this time," he said, half-broken voice lowering in register, "you wouldn't have friends to rescue you."

My hands squeezed into fists in my pockets. It was hard to admit, but he was right. If the cops weren't looking for me, it would be another story, but I'd left too many bodies in my wake. They'd be on me before I even saw the starport. And if Vigilus did have cops on the payroll, odds were I'd be committing a very convenient suicide before the end of the week.

"What sort of 'kindness'?" I asked.

"A simple one." He turned and drew his hand across the miniature cityscape, shifting away from the skyscrapers and off towards what I remembered as the factory district. "Accompany our people on an operation. Aid them in whatever way you can."

I took a couple steps forward and stared down at the building he had specified, its pulsing outline lighting up the faces around me. "Smash and grab, I'm guessing?"

Fyr clasped his hands behind his back and said dryly, "I prefer 'procurement.' "

"I'm sure you do." I turned to Fyr, glaring. "And afterward?"

"Afterward, you will be escorted to the starport, where you'll be given a false ID and enough papers to get you through security unmolested," he said seriously.

"And I'm supposed to believe that?"

"I don't see that you have much of a choice."

I frowned and felt a rumble building in my throat. Fyr drew himself up to his full height, about half a head taller than me.

"I am a man of my word, Sartorus," he said. "And you have my word."

The tension was thick in the air. I felt eyes on me from all sides. Amina shifted in my periphery, arms crossed, looking at me expectantly.

It's a bad place to be, when there's no way out but down.

I took a deep breath and wished I had a smoke. "When do we leave?"

* * *

 

It was cramped in the skycar. Bigger than most, almost-but-not-quite a shuttle. Smart. Those stood out more from the crowd. They'd want to go unnoticed until they piled out in armor and guns and started shooting up the place.

I wasn't so lucky. I had been given a few pieces of armor, a small personal shield generator, and a Bluewire. A fucking Bluewire. With a read/write lock on it, and not a single offensive app to be found.

They might as well have given me a sharp stick and a book of knock-knock jokes.

I sat in the rear of the car, elbows on my knees, squeezing my hands together. The boy in the seat across was glaring at me. Kad, from the other day. Or 'Kadros,' as he'd corrected me. He had apparently taken it upon himself to keep an eye on me. Or he'd been given orders. I wasn't sure which.

A rifle butt jostled my knee and I turned to the offender. Idra. A little older than Amina, with light blue markings from out west, in the mountains. She smirked at me and went back to attaching the extended barrel to her old-model Vindicator. Of all of them, she seemed to mind my presence the least, but I got the feeling it was only because she was confident she could take me out without any trouble.

On the opposite side, Jar grumbled as he poked at his omni-tool. He looked about ten years my senior, with a stubby fringe and fading purple Elurian markings, but for all I knew, he could have been younger. He acted like he'd seen a lot of combat in his day, but he didn't have a single scar on him that I could see. He wasn't who worried me.

That would be the driver. Sevus. The quiet one. Lean and mean and barefaced, with cold grey eyes that stared right through you. He hadn't said so much as a word to me, or to anyone, for that matter. People talked at him and he followed orders to the letter. I had to assume he was from off-world, but what he was doing here and why he'd signed up with Facinus was beyond me. Probably beyond everyone else, too.

"Everyone ready?" Jar asked, acting as the leader of this little heist.

"For anything," Idra said, slapping a heatsink into her rifle.

Kad nodded, then double-checked his shield generator.

I shrugged my shoulders. "Ready as I can be without a single way to defend myself."

"Aw, feelin' left out?" Jar said, pouting mockingly. "Well, you're a big boy. You can handle it."

"I don't even know what I'm doing here," I said. "I'm a liability without a weapon."

"And you're a bigger liability with one," Idra said. "Besides, you're not here because we need an extra gun."

"Then why am I here?" I demanded. "The hell are we even doing?"

Jar made a face, mandibles fluttering, and I couldn't tell if he was stifling a grin or a grimace. "You want to tell him, boy?"

Kad shifted in the seat across from me, shotgun across his lap. "Have to?"

The old man turned towards the front seat. "Sev, we more than halfway there yet?"

"Yes," the driver replied. Alright, so he wasn't a mute. Good to know.

Jar looked to Kad and shrugged. "About that time, then."

The boy seemed to tense a little, finger resting on the trigger guard of his weapon. "Hitting a storage warehouse attached to a factory, owned by Dynamax Munitions. Supplier for the militia, and for the Hierarchy navy."

Made sense. Hurts the militia, gets them supplies. And along the way, they're trying to get the attention of the bigger players. Trying to get someone to listen to them the only way they knew how. But that left one very important question: "How am I supposed to help?"

"You're along because we need you to tell us what to grab when we get there."

I blinked. My mouth was suddenly very dry. "What are we grabbing?"

Kad almost smiled. "A whole lot of explosives."

My hands squeezed so hard I felt my talons break skin. I wanted to jump up, grab a gun, bring down this damn car and make a run for it.

Then I saw them all staring at me, hands on their weapons. Waiting.

It was pointless. They were all on edge. They could take me easily, put me down without an ounce of trouble. And I needed them, to keep Vigilus off my back and get me off this fucking planet. And they needed me to help them pick how best to blow something up.

Me. The ex-bomb tech.

Pieces started sliding into place that I didn't know were missing at all. I wanted to scream. I settled for a deep breath through my mouth, fluttering my mandibles, and sinking into my seat while my erstwhile allies watched me out of the corners of their eyes.

The skycar began its descent.

No way out but down.


	8. Cold Comfort

The skycar lowered to the ground. My heart was thundering in my chest. There wasn’t any way out short of suicide, and even if they wanted my help, they’d just as soon do it without me. They’d come too far not to. And hell, so had I. All I could do was find a way to minimize the damage.

So I started working out a plan. Step one: don’t get killed. Can’t do any good if I’m dead. Step two: prevent any unnecessary casualties. I wasn’t sure how trigger happy these separatists were, or what kind of security we were dealing with. They hadn’t exactly filled me in before we left. Step three… well, since I was clearly no good at thinking ahead, I figured I’d stick to two.

We landed with a thud and the doors flew open. Everyone piled out, the driver included. We were in the factory district, which meant things were even more drab than they normally are in Vallum—nothing but concrete, asphalt and metal, and not a soul in sight. Our target looked like a typical industrial warehouse, though it attached at the far end to a larger building I suspected was the factory itself.

Kadros shoved me in the back to hurry me up. We headed around into an alley and stacked up on one of the side doors, up a few stairs. Jar signaled from the front, then burst through, the rest of us following close behind.

It was late in the afternoon. Probably around shift change for security, maybe for the workers themselves too, since we didn’t see anyone immediately. After a few moments, the dull corridor’s cheap vinyl tiles and off-white drywall gave way to a larger, two-story cargo area, metal racks holding pallets full of ammo blocks and crates of heatsinks.

Jar produced a blade from his omni-tool and pried open one of the crates. Cylindrical thermal clips spilled out in a heap, rolling across the floor. “Load up,” he said, and everyone took one or two from the pile, slapping them into magnetic holds on their hips or back. Except me, of course. No point to it.

“Alright, people. Explosives are in a secure bay, far side of the warehouse.” Jar shouldered his rifle. “We move quick, we can be in and out before—”

“Freeze!”

I spun around just in time to see a bullet catch the security guard in the face. He staggered for a moment, dropped the pistol he’d drawn, and crumpled. His skull made a wet sound when it hit the floor.

“Shit!” Jar cursed loudly, moving back where we came.

“Great job, Sev.”

“Shut it, woman,” the old man reprimanded. “It was gonna happen eventually. You jamming comms, Sev?”

“Yes,” he said flatly.

“Good. Then it’s just local security we have to deal with. Cops won’t be here for at least another twenty minutes. Longer if we’re lucky.”

We were moving with purpose, and Kad was still behind me. I didn’t have time to dwell on the dead man as we stepped over his body. All I caught were dark plates and Carthaan markings. Wasn’t even local.

We started taking fire as we moved into another bay. Jar and Idra took cover behind a cargo container with helpful hazard warnings stenciled on the side, while Kad, Sev and I had to retreat to the door.

“How many?” Jar barked.

“I don’t know,” Kad replied. “Can’t get a bearing!”

Idra started laying down fire on the other side of the bay. There was too much cover, too many broken sightlines to tell, and the shots echoed too much to pin them down. It seemed like a hell of a lot of fire for security guards with pistols. Either there were more than they’d expected, or they had better hardware.

Jar jerked his head back at us. “We’ll keep them busy! Get what we came for!”

Kad visibly hesitated, but it didn’t last long. He steeled himself and turned away from the door, shoving me further down the corridor. Sev took point without a word.

We were moving too fast for me to argue, but I was running out of patience. I hated feeling useless, and in a situation like this, that’s all I felt. I knew there wasn’t a clean way out of this, but that didn’t mean I had to make it easy for them.

Sev may have been capable, but he didn’t check his corners–he was caught in a tackle as he passed by a branch in the corridor. He tried to free his gun, couldn’t. The other man—who I suspected wasn’t even security, since he didn’t have a gun himself—was smart enough to keep Sev between him and Kad.

He wasn’t a great conversationalist, but in a fight, Sevus was slick and slippery. A quick headbutt, a twist of the hands, and an arm bar had the would-be hero on his knees. He snapped the arm across his knee, threw a pair of quick, brutal punches that broke both mandibles, and that was that.

He grabbed his gun and managed to duck behind the wall before he started taking fire from the corridor. I stole a glance around the corner and saw at least two guards with heavy pistols.

“Sure wish I had a gun,” I said.

“Shut up.” Kad shifted next to me, gripping his shotgun a bit too tightly. “Sev, cover us.”

Sev nodded tightly and fired a series of staccato bursts from his submachine gun. Kad and I moved across and ahead of him.

“Go,” he said, keeping to his one-word sentences.

The boy shook his head. “We can’t split up anymore, that’s not part of the–”

Sev drew a grenade from his belt and primed it in front of Kad’s face. That shut him up quick.

“Cover,” he said, before he tossed it down the hall. Two seconds later, the resulting explosion shook the entire floor and knocked cheap pieces of inoffensive office art off the walls. Sev broke from cover and moved up, firing bursts and leaving us behind.

Kad looked dumbstruck, but turned and shoved me forward again. Now that we were alone, I was starting to see possibilities.

“Only one gun, kid,” I dryly when Kad glanced behind us for the third time. “Hope you can handle yourself, because all I’ve got is this deadly tech-armor app.”

“Shut up,” he growled.

“Why? You gonna make me?”

He frowned and moved up to check a corner. I stuck close behind, for all the good I could do. Kad took his sweet time before he started to move forward, through another long hall, windows and doors on either side. One lead toward more offices, the other a raised catwalk for a larger room. We hadn’t gone up any stairs, so it must have been built into the ground. Some kind of testing area, looked like.

“All I’ve got is harsh language, anyway,” I said to no one. “You take that away I might as well just–”

Fire shattered the windows to our right. I threw myself down and took cover beneath the broken windows as Kad pointlessly returned fire with his shotgun.

When he ducked down, I asked, “How many?”

“No more than two,” he said, trying to sound confident. “I can handle it.”

“You could handle it better if you had help.”

“If you think–”

A close ricochet nearly ended our conversation. Kad’s armor deflected it, but he had a nice long score on his right greave. He stared down at it.

I held up my left arm and said, with as much false sincerity as I could muster, “Kadros. They’re shooting at me, too.”

Another long moment of hesitation, during which I could hear them starting to move up, and then Kad brought up his omni-tool and keyed it. The Bluewire booted up and I started punching in code from memory, cursing the damn thing the whole time. Aldrin Labs’ haptic interfaces really were garbage.

I had a basic formula for a grenade, one of the first I’d learned back in the corps. I queued up the process and it was a full eight seconds before it was in my hands. Some of the longest seconds of my life.

Once I finally felt the weight of it settle into my palm, I slid over to the edge of the wall, leaned around the corner, and threw it sidearm. It was an old pre-war design, disc-shaped, and it made a warbling sound as it spun through the air before contacting with the floor beneath two pairs of feet.

I managed to turn away before I caught the flash full in my eyes, then got up and sprinted forward. Had to hand it to them, they kept to their training. One of the first things you learn in boot camp—if you can’t see, don’t shoot. You’re as likely to hit a friendly as a hostile.

A hook and an uppercut later and they were down. Unconscious, but alive. My good deed for the day.

While I collected their pistols, Kad came up behind me. He looked torn between thanking me, hurrying me along, and demanding I drop the guns. I only had a few moments to figure out my play while I slapped one into a hold on my hip, and I went with my gut.

Flipped the second gun in my hand and held it out, grip first. “Better at range,” I said.

The kid stared at it, then at me. He took it and said nothing.

I was about to say something cute when a pair of bullets whistled between us. Dropped low again, scanning around the metal desk. We were in the offices proper now, so I wasn’t sure if these were guards or more overzealous desk jockeys. In either case, I was reluctant to make use of my newly acquired firearm.

Glanced over at Kad, found him looking pissed. I imagined he’d been told this would be a lot easier than it was turning out to be.

“Keep ‘em distracted,” I said. “I’ll flank.”

I didn’t give him a chance to argue and made my move, shuffling from the desk to the wall of another office. I heard Kad’s shotgun booming behind me and almost smiled as I hacked a door and started to make my way through a long conference room.

There was a long moment where I suddenly realized that I was separated from my would-be captors with a fully functional omni-tool. Hand halfway to my ear, I remembered Jar’s mention of jamming comms. Sure enough, the signal couldn’t get through. Probably something running in the skycar, or maybe Sev had overclocked a fancier ‘tool and was doing it on the fly. Either way, it was definitely a wide-band jammer. Would have taken me at least five minutes to find a way through or around it, probably closer to ten. I didn’t have that kind of time.

Something moved in my periphery. My gun jumped up and I slowly sidled around the table until I saw a foot sticking out from underneath.

“Come out slow.”

“Don’t shoot!” a voice chirped from underneath. “I’m not armed!”

Slowly, a man crawled out from underneath, with some difficulty since his hands were up, palms out. Simple clothes, clean and well-kept, and no omni-tool on either wrist. Deep purple markings said he was from up north.

“Carcosa?” I asked.

He startled—he had been staring at my fringe—then nodded. “Not… much work up north anymore.”

I heard more glass shatter beyond the door and was keenly aware of the sound of Kad’s shotgun.

“Not keen on grabbing a gun and joining your friends in their spirited defense?” I asked.

The man shook his head vigorously. “No! No, no. I was a terrible shot in boot camp. Barely qualified. Got reassigned. Field support—”

“Yeah, yeah, whatever,” I said, lowering my gun and squatting down next to him. “Look, can you do me a favor?”

He gaped. “What?”

I didn’t really know what I was doing at the time, but it seemed like the only play I had.

“Stay down and out of sight. Don’t be a hero. The cops’ll be here shortly. There’ll probably be a guy named Parthus with them. You’ll know him when you see him, dark plates, white markings, looks like he sleeps in his uniform—”

Another crash and a scream. Didn’t sound like Kad, but I couldn’t be sure.

“Tell him—”

Now that I thought about it, what was I supposed to tell him? What would he do with what little information I could give him? More importantly, who else would he tell? Parthus seemed like the kind of guy who took things upon himself, didn’t delegate much, and expected to be followed rather than questioned. But a rough impression of a man from two short conversations was pretty thin ice to rest my hopes on.

I settled for something cryptic. Something that he would hopefully recognize the intent of. Something that would at least get him thinking.

“Tell him he was right,” I said. “I am a coward. And I shouldn’t be here.”

I didn’t give my new friend time to answer. I’d wasted too much already. Stood and walked over to the door farther than where I’d come in. It had gone surprisingly quiet in the last few seconds. I turned back and found Mr. Field Support crouching back behind the conference table. I nodded at him while I queued up an electrical charge on my omni-tool, then threw open the door.

One of the guards was crouched behind a planter, my side. His partner laid a few feet away, bleeding out and turning the red carpet a vivid violet. The place was a mess, the glass doors to nearly every office vaporized, desks overturned and personal effects from plants to pictures thrown everywhere by the chaos.

I moved as fast as I could once I had a gauge on the situation, but the guard had heard the door open. If he wasn’t in the middle of reloading a particularly stubborn heat sink, I would have caught a bullet. I tackled him down onto the floor, pressed my left fist into his throat, and watched him seize until I was certain my makeshift taser had put him out.

Glanced over at his partner. Saw he was still breathing. Took one of the small medi-gel packets my Facinus friends had given me and pressed it into the hole in his stomach. He barely flinched, which was bad news. Too far gone. Probably wouldn’t make it.

“Took your sweet time.”

I took a breath and turned. Kad had moved from cover, and stood above me looking as torn as before. The pistol I’d given him was in his hands.

“Ran into some trouble of my own,” I said.

He looked at the door to the conference room. Still open.

“It’s dealt with.” I spared one last glance for the poor son of a bitch dying on the tacky carpeting before I stood and squared my shoulders. “Let’s just get what we came for.”

As though to punctuate my statement, there was another loud boom from elsewhere in the building. Another one of Sev’s grenades, I imagined. Or maybe some of the guards were dipping into the store before we could.

Kad ground his teeth and jerked his head. “Come on,” he said, and for once, he led the way.

Don’t think I didn’t consider clocking him over the back of the head and making a run for it, either. For better or worse, the rational part of me managed to beat back the cowardice long enough for us to weave our way through more drab corridors until we found a large, locked door with a number of very specific warnings printed on it in yellow and black.

Before I could offer to hack it with my shitty Bluewire, the door opened and an armor-clad guard with an armful of grenades stopped just short of colliding with us. Kad jumped back, scrambling to unhook the shotgun off his hip, while I calmly pressed my gun to the guard’s forehead.

“Drop ‘em.”

He did. Unprimed grenades and detonation packs clattered to the ground.

“Hands up. Back off slowly.”

The guard was glaring daggers at me, but he complied. I heard Kad follow me into the room while I directed the unlucky security guard up against a wall.

“This the place?” I asked aloud, not taking my eyes off my prisoner.

“Yeah…” Kad answered. “Yeah, looks like.”

“Then c’mere and watch him so I can look around.”

The kid came up beside me and didn’t question the order. Even though we could have just knocked him out or disabled him any number of ways, or killed him outright. Kadros was clearly better at following orders than at thinking for himself. A better turian than you’d expect from a separatist.

Which was good, because I didn’t need him watching me while I thought about how best to fuck over him and his little terrorist cell.

The storage area for the explosive munitions was a lot larger, with thick, armored walls and warning signs placed at regular intervals. Several stories tall, with vast metal shelves packed with numerous crates. All sealed, but all helpfully marked with their make and model of violent, propulsive death. The stock ranged from cheap semtex and plastique to much smaller quantities of expensive antimatter propellants. Bandoliers of hand grenades, mods for antimaterial rifles, massive anti-tank warheads… it was a demo team’s wet dream. Or a bomb tech’s nightmare.

I started running through options in my head as I walked through the aisles, scanning the contents. Not a lot of time, so I had to think quickly. Knew I couldn’t sell them on something cheap or weak, like semtex. They might not know exactly what they were looking for, but they weren’t stupid. But that didn’t mean I had to give them what they wanted.

Nothing too powerful. Nothing too simple. Something fancy, but unwieldy. Something inefficient.

Sadly, explosives are the one industry where inefficiency is rarely a concern. I had almost given up hope when I rounded the corner of a shelving unit and found my best shot.

I’d worked in construction a long time, and construction post-war naturally involved a lot of deconstruction. Controlled collapses and debris clearing. I’d only ever used torpex once, but once was more than enough. It was cumbersome, unwieldy, used a tandem-charge arc-heating system that required far more setup than conventional methods, and for all its reps boasted about its efficiency, it was a far better shape charge than it was a high explosive. Ended up delaying demolition by three days while we had to rig up the entire building again. Used nearly twice as much of the damned explosive as we’d expected.

But it was fancy, expensive, and looked high-tech as all hell. If it could sucker me, it could sucker them.

I grabbed a handcart hanging on the wall, slipped the forks under the crate, and turned it on. The blue glow of a mass effect field enveloped the black crate and it pulled out effortlessly.

“Done,” I said, heading back for the door. “Got it. Let’s go.”

“You sure?” Kad asked.

“What the fuck did you bring me for?” I snapped. “Of course I’m sure. Now let’s go.”

The kid backed up, heading for the door. Of course, that’s when the guard finally chose to speak up.

“You really think you’re getting away with this?” he said. “Where the cops and the Hierarchy won’t go, Vigilus will. There will be retribution for this.”

Kad halted dead in his tracks. Turned slowly. “Oh, yeah? Oh, yeah?”

I ground my teeth. “Kad—”

One blast from his shotgun punched through armor. The joint of the knee folded like an empty paper bag and the Vigilus spokesman went down screaming.

The boy spat on the floor. “How’s that for retribution?”

“Kad,” I said patiently, “if you’re finished maiming the man, can we go?”

He turned and shoved his way past me and the cargo, keying something into his omni-tool. Pinging the rest of the team, I figured, since Sev and Idra met us along the way, and Jar was already at the exit when we got there, holding the door, motioning for us to hurry.

I passed plenty of bodies on the way out, but I couldn’t spare more than a moment’s pity. Knowing that Vigilus had agents here lessened the guilt a bit, but I knew they weren’t nearly as prevalent as they made themselves out to be. The man under the conference table was proof enough of that.

The rear hatch of the skycar opened and we ducked inside with our ill-gotten cargo. I heard sirens in the distance. As the skycar rose into the air, I told myself I’d done my best. That people were alive who wouldn’t be if I weren’t there.

It was cold comfort.


	9. The Difference Between Us

It was a long ride back to the safe house. After it was clear we weren't being followed, the rest of the group started laughing and celebrating. Jar gave me a once over, then shot Kad a pointed look. The boy reached over and plucked the pistol from my hip. I didn't protest.

We landed in the rooftop parking garage of the abandoned high rise and filed out. Difficult, since the crate took up most of the small passenger bay.

"Alright, people," Jar said, raising his voice, "stow our prize and your gear while I go give Fyr the good news. Then, take the rest of the night for yourselves. Briefing at oh-six-hundred tomorrow."

Idra clapped Kad on the shoulder while Sev took the handcart and headed for the elevator. Jar took Kad aside while I stood at the edge of the garage, leaning on the concrete railing. I stared out at the sunset, bruising the sky behind Vallum's skyscrapers, and found myself thinking about how it must have looked when that ship hit the city center going faster than light.

I looked down at my hands, tacky with blood, and wiped them on the cheap armor breastplate beneath my jacket. I really needed a cigarette.

After a minute, Kad came over, shotgun still held easy in his hands.

"Hey," he said, almost tentatively. "Time to go inside."

I sniffed the air. Engine exhaust, spent heat sinks. Sweat and blood. "Yeah. Alright."

Followed him to the elevator, waited for it to return. Everyone else had already left. A long, interminable minute passed while we waited. Kad kept glancing my way, and I thought he was acting paranoid, like he expected me to make a break for it.

Then he said, "Thanks."

I said nothing. Kept my eyes on the dulled, worn-out chrome of the elevator door.

"Was a lot more of them than we thought," he continued. "I might be dead if it weren't for you."

All the anger that I'd been shoving inward suddenly switched directions. I ground my teeth and curled my hands into fists and wanted to start pulling out Kad's teeth one by one.

"I didn't do it for you, boy," I said, subharmonics dripping with venom.

That set him back on his heels. The door opened and I stalked in. He followed, a little stiffly. Another too-long wait while the elevator descended to the right floor, during which I came to a decision.

I'd done him his kindness. Now I was going to give Fyrran Exar a piece of my fucking mind.

The doors opened and I marched out. I knew where I was going. Kad kept pace with me. The shotgun was still in his hands, but it wasn't pointed at me.

"Hey," he said, "where are you going?"

"Going to talk to your glorious leader," I growled.

"You can't," he protested. "I've got orders."

I shot him the worst look I had. "Then shoot me."

Kad struggled with that decision long enough for us to arrive at the command center door. I brought up the Bluewire they hadn't yet taken from me and scanned its files for a code or passkey. Found a few, tried each one until it took.

"You can't do this," the boy whined, leveling his shotgun at me. I ignored him.

The third code I tried got the door open.

The old conference room was as dark as before, but not nearly as crowded. It was just Fyrran and Jar, huddled over the central table. The holographic skyline had expanded, and three buildings were lit, orange against the neon blue: a building I recognized as a security precinct in the northwest, and on the opposite end of the city, two major residential blocks.

I froze. I know I can be slow on the uptake sometimes, but right then, all it took was a glance to know what the plan was.

Standard operating procedure during and after a major terrorist attack is to put out a curfew. Send everyone to their homes so the official authorities can search and destroy without worrying about anyone getting caught in the crossfire. Usually lasts a full day.

The precinct was a diversion. Get all the cops and militia on the wrong side of the city, get everyone inside their homes. And then...

"Barefaced son of a bitch," I hissed.

Fyr turned then, and his one eye regarded me coldly. He glanced over my shoulder. "Kadros? What is this?"

Without thinking, I stepped forward and threw a hard right cross. Felt good when it connected. Tried to grab him by the neck but he shoved me off easily and Jar got between us while Kad's shotgun dug into the small of my back.

Fyr reached up and touched a finger beneath his mandible. It came away with a dab of blue. He stared at it, brushing it between his thumb and nearfinger. "How ungrateful."

"Ungrateful?" I growled threateningly, hands flexing pointlessly at my sides. Jar put a heavy hand on my cowl and gripped hard, other hand pulling back into a fist. I didn't spare him a glance. "I'll show you 'ungrateful.' Soon as you step out from behind the old man, coward."

The one-eyed man straightened a bit, frowning slightly. "Jar."

After a long moment, I felt the old man's grip loosen. He slowly stepped away, off to the side, while Fyr advanced a few paces to get within arm's reach. Even with a shotgun barrel up against my spine, I still had to fight not to reach out and put my hands around his neck.

"You should be grateful," he said simply. "I could have left you in the care of your Hierarchy compatriots. I could have let you wither and die without a second thought. Instead, I plucked you from pain and death and brought you into my home.

"And then," he said, taking another step, flattened subharmonics still managing to thrum with authority and offense, "I ask but one favor. One, out of the lifetime owed to me, and you would be free to leave."

My mandibles flickered with impotent rage. "And if I had known what that 'favor' was—"

"You would have fought and you would have lost. Keeping it from you was easiest for both of us. Besides..." He turns his head slightly, to better look me in the eye. "I expect you would have cooperated regardless."

There was bile creeping up my throat. "Like hell."

Fyr hummed skeptically. Then, without taking his eye off me, he said, "Lock him up. Somewhere empty, where he won't hurt himself."

I felt one of Jar's thick hands grip my bicep hard and pull. I yanked back, unwilling to back down for whatever reason, staring up into Fyr's icy blue eye.

"Be grateful," he rumbled, "that this was all I asked of you."

A hard pull dragged me off balance and shoved me towards the door. Kad shifted out of the way and I cast one last dark look back at Fyr, who had turned to the holo like I was already gone.

They took me to a room on the opposite side of the building, near where I'd heard these people playing their little card game when I went exploring. It was small and empty, walls, floor, and ceiling bare of anything but light strips. Might have been someone's office space, once, or maybe a glorified storage closet. Jar stripped off my omni-tool and shoved me in. The powered door slammed shut behind me. I didn't have to try it to know it was locked.

For a while, I paced around like a caged varren. I couldn't believe where I'd landed myself. In a Facinus safe house, waiting around while they planned the deaths of hundreds using explosives I'd helped them acquire. And for what? So they could continue a fruitless quest for attention, and I could get a shuttle ride off this planet. Leaving a trail of bodies behind me because I was so concerned for my own sorry hide.

The door opened before I could start seriously considering putting my fist through the wall. Still in the same civex body armor, now with a pistol strapped to her hip, Amina strode in and came up short when she caught the look in my eye.

She took a deep breath, and in a calming voice, said, "I know how you must feel."

"Do you?" I said, turning to face her fully.

Her mandibles clamped tight against her face. "For what it's worth, I'm sorry."

I gaped. "You're sorry? You force me to help you steal a bomb, help you kill people, and you're fucking sorry?"

"It was the only way they'd agree to help you," she said plainly.

"Oh, you couldn't just whisper in Exar's ear?" I sneered. "Because he seems to listen real close."

Her browplates furrowed and her tones went from honest to confused. "What?"

"You heard me."

Amina paused, looking both baffled and offended. "I don't know what you think—"

"Don't pull that shit on me. Don't insult us both." I paced back and forth in front of her, too angry to sit still, too anxious for a fight, and too high on my own self-righteousness. "I just can't figure out whether you were using me from the beginning or not."

"Sorono—"

"How much did you know before you stepped outside that station? Did you know Vigilus was watching you? Did you want them to come after me?"

"I didn't—"

"I mean, why else would you throw yourself at me? A broken down, scarred up old man, you must have wanted something. Unless you just have a thing for older men with scars—"

"Sor!"

Her voice stopped me dead in my tracks. The look in her eyes was all hurt and fury, fists squeezed tight by her sides. She spat out her next words through ground teeth like a vicious curse.

"I'm not fucking Fyrran."

Despite every doubt and suspicion and angry accusation flying through my head, in that moment, I believed her. And in the handful of seconds it took to process that, Amina collected herself enough to continue.

"You want to know why I was outside that fucking station? Why, when I came back to your hotel that morning and found you missing, I went to Fyr and begged him to find you?" Something in her subharmonics trilled softly as she spoke, a thin, wavering note. "It's because anyone else in this city would have walked by that alley without a second glance. And for as much as you act like you don't care, you couldn't."

She looked away, shook her head. "That's why I hoped you understand. What we're doing here... it's necessary. We can't just turn our head and walk away."

"Necessary?" I hissed disbelievingly. "Killing men, women, and children in their homes is necessary?"

Amina looked up and glared at me. "We don't do that. Legitimate targets only."

"Are you sure about that?"

A nod. The conviction in her eyes was absolute. She really didn't know.

"Then maybe you should go talk to Fyr," I said slowly, shaking my head. "Because you clearly don't know him as well as you think you do."

"What are you saying?"

"I'm saying the targets he's choosing aren't 'legitimate.' They're housing complexes. Apartment blocks."

She frowned. "Wh—no. No, we're striking a security—"

"It's a diversion," I explained to her obviously. "Gets the cops elsewhere, and everyone inside. More casualties when they bring the buildings down."

"You're lying."

I shrugged. "Why would I? You'll find out soon enough anyway."

Amina was staring at me, almost angrily, blinking rapidly. Her hand came up to pull at the right side of her fringe. After a moment, she closed her eyes and shook her head. "If that's what's necessary—"

"Listen to yourself!" Something almost like a manic laugh bubbled up out of my throat. "You're trying to justify this?"

"The Hierarchy doctrine is total war—"

"Fuck the doctrine!" I said, stepping forward again, close enough to touch. "It doesn't apply! You haven't given a warning or presented any demands. You're using deception to kill as many unarmed people as possible. That isn't war, it's slaughter."

"Because they won't listen!" she shouted bitterly, breath hot against my face, pointing at the wall as though it were a window to the rest of the galaxy. "All the protests and petitions and debates and rallys, year after year after year, and where did it get us?! They ignore us until we get too loud, and then they turn a blind eye while Vigilus tears out our throats! This is the only way they'll understand!"

"You can't think they'll care." I stepped back and turned away, pacing the length of the room, throwing my arms wide. "They'll send troops to hunt down every last one of you and raze this building to the ground before they sit at a table with anyone who wants secession."

"It's independence!"

I spun quickly. "It's a delusion!"

The words reverberated off the walls. A sudden silence hung in the air. I took advantage of it by lowering my voice.

"You think I don't understand? You think I never looked around and wondered if things couldn't be better?" I stepped towards her, hands spread at my sides. "Taetran or Hierarchy, I'm no patriot. But I know what I'm capable of, and it isn't this."

She was staring right at me. Piercing green eyes. I swallowed.

"You can't tell me you aren't thinking the same thing."

Her jaw twitched, mouth trembled. She looked furious, or distraught. Or just disappointed. In who or what, I didn't know.

Amina took a deep breath and said, "I know what I am."

Slowly, she turned and walked for the door. I wanted to stop her, grab her, spin her around and keep shouting until she saw reason, but I couldn't. I stood there and watched her go.

Before she opened the door, she paused. "That's the difference between us, isn't it," she wondered quietly, turned so I could see her profile. "The sympathizer and the activist."

A quick key of her tool, and she ducked out the door. It shut and locked behind her.

I walked backward and collapsed against the wall, sliding to the floor. I squeezed my hands together and bowed my head.

And for the first time since I was a boy, I appealed to the spirits.


	10. A Very Simple Question

I felt exhausted, but I didn't get much sleep. Might have passed out at one point or another, but I always jerked awake to nameless nightmares and the sensation of falling. I was too tired to think, too anxious to sleep, and more aware than ever of the feeling of my heart thudding in my chest.

The last time I woke up, it was to the sound of voices outside my door. Muffled and hard to make out, but present. One was louder, male. The other quiet.

I shuffled to the opposite wall, next to the door.

"–can't just leave me here–"

"It's not up to you."

"It's not up to you, either! It's up to Fyr!"

"And these are his orders."

"They're only his orders because he listens to you! I'm not stupid, Ami!"

"Kad–"

"Just because he knew your father–"

"Kadros!"

Silence.

"This is important to me, Kad."

No answer.

"I'm trusting you."

"Fine."

Faintly, I heard the keying of an omni-tool.

"See you on the other side."

The door opened and I shut my eyes. I heard someone take a few steps in and turn. Felt something gently nudge my foot and blinked open my eyes.

Amina was in armor. Not just a civex and ceramic breastplate, full tactical gear. Looked like standard issue militia, urban pacification stuff, though it wasn't complete–the gauntlets and boots were Elanus-brand. Their solid gunmetal coloring stood out against the grey and white digital urban camouflage of the rest.

She had a pistol in one hand and her helmet in the other, resting on her hip. She looked down at me impassively.

For a long moment, neither of us said anything. The lights on the cowl of her armor caught my eye. Sign of a personal shield generator, maybe a powered exoskeleton. I met her gaze in a silent question.

"First bomb went off less than an hour ago," she said plainly. "A separate team is leading the cops away. We move in five."

A wave of nausea broke over me. I swallowed.

"You'll stay here until the job is done," she continued. "Then you'll be escorted to the roof, and a skycar, where you'll be taken to the spaceport and an unmarked freighter. We've paid off the pilot, and he'll take you in his cargo hold as far as the relay jump station. You should be able to book passage to Illium from there."

Her voice was cool and collected, like she'd practiced this speech, but when it was done, she seemed lost. Her eyes were so distant she might as well have been staring at the wall, and she shifted her weight ever so slightly.

"I guess this is goodbye."

I traced the lines of her markings with my eyes. In the harsh fluorescent lighting of this aging office building, she looked too old. Not how I remembered.

I remembered how she looked silhouetted against the hotel window, the city lights framing her body. I remembered how she felt against me, heavy and warm. How she tasted. How she smelled. Mostly, I remembered how she smiled. Big, laughing grins. Coyly, behind the bottle in her hands. I remember the sense of comfort I felt that despite everything she must have gone through, this world hadn't broken her yet.

There, in that room... not how I remembered her at all.

I felt like I should say something. But there was nothing left to say.

Amina seemed to know it too. Her mandibles quivered for a handful of moments, and then she left without another word. I heard her stop outside the door, presumably exchange some wordless moment with Kad, and then march down the hall. The sound of her boots against the tiled floor grew fainter, then finally disappeared.

I sat there for too long, alternately wishing desperately for a cigarette and tearing myself apart for doing what I did. Coming to her rescue. Coming here at all. I ran circles around my head, trying to justify my actions, and getting angrier and angrier until I couldn't stand it anymore.

A coward and a traitor. Didn't matter what I did, that was always how it was going to end.

But it all came down to a very simple question: could I live with myself if I did nothing?

No.

I didn't have a weapon or a tool. I didn't even have a plan. All I had were a vague notion of where the bombings where taking place, and a whole shitload of righteous fury.

I could work with that.

When I stood up and dusted myself off, I had to quell the urge to scratch my palms raw. I swore to whatever spirit was listening that if I lived long enough, I was smoking an entire carton of Carthaan Blues next chance I got.

I moved to the door. There was a tiny retractable viewing port built into it. Looked jury-rigged by someone with slightly more mechanical aptitude than the typical grunt, but it clearly wasn't part of the original design. I imagined this room didn't see a lot of use–Facinus never took a lot of prisoners.

"Hey," I shouted, rapping on the port. "Kid, are you still out there?"

No answer.

"Kid, I will shout at this wall until I'm hoarse in both throats, don't think I won't."

"Be quiet!" Kad demanded. "Spirits alive..."

"Oh, like you're gonna do anything about it."

I leaned against the wall and considered my play. I knew what my priorities were. I knew even with torpex's absurd set-up, I didn't have a lot of time. All I could do right now was talk. I was good at that. But how would that help?

"You don't like bein' here, do you kid?"

He scoffed. I barely heard it through the door.

"Don't blame you," I said. "Wouldn't like it either. Left behind while all your friends go off to glory and valor. Stuck on guard duty for a cranky old man... but you're probably used to that from Jar."

"You're really going to keep talking, aren't you?" he asked with a sigh.

"Well, what else am I going to do?" I slid into a sitting position. "Sing?"

That almost got a laugh out of him. I could tell. Good.

"You ever wonder why I came here, Kadros?" I asked, purposefully using his proper name.

Another too-long pause, and I wondered if Kad was smarter than he seemed, but then he said, "Amina said you hated it here."

"I do. Always have, always will. But..." I sighed loudly. "You can't hate family. Not really."

I waited, and said nothing. Let him have to work to draw me out.

"You have family here?" he finally asked.

"Yeah," I lied. "A sister."

Again, I waited. Not long this time. "Older or younger?"

"Older," I drawled, feigning humor. "Always thought she knew best, just because she had a few years on me. Got on my nerves like no one else."

Another almost laugh, barely audible, and I knew I had my in. All I had to do was play it careful.

"We had a falling out. Before I left. I... said some things I regret." I shuffled my feet against the floor a little, for authenticity, then wondered if he was listening close enough to even notice. "Haven't spoken in... well, in a long time."

"So... she's why you're here?" he asked, and I could practically hear the gears turning in his head. "You wanted to make amends?"

"Yeah. She remarried recently. Lost her first husband in the war." I frowned and shook my head. Too much. But if Kad was as soft a touch as I figured him for, it wouldn't matter. "I was trying to get a hold of her the night that I became acquainted with Vigilus."

"Bastards," Kad said almost automatically.

"Uh-huh." I hesitated exactly as long as I needed to. "Look, Kadros..."I said, trailing off.

"What?" he asked curiously.

I grinned.

"I... I'm not gonna get the chance to make amends proper. Not gonna be able to come back here again... but I don't want her to die today."

Silence. I took a breath, and continued.

"I know I'm not in any position to make demands–"

"You're right," Kad said brusquely. "You're not."

Damn. I pressed on, edging a little desperation into my voice. "She's my sister. I just want to her to live past today. Is that so much to ask?"

More silence. I swallowed.

"If you were in my place, what would you want?"

I let that thought hang in the air and hoped that I hadn't misread Kad, or his feelings towards Amina. I'd only get one shot at this. If he shut me out, that was it. I was back to square one.

After a long, interminable pause, Kad sighed. "What are you askin' me?"

"She never checks her texts," I said, standing up and heading near the door. "But she checks her voicemail compulsively. If I told you the number, could you call her tool?"

"And say what?" he asked dubiously.

"Just hold it up to the door. Don't worry," I said loudly, cutting off what I knew must be a quickly forming denial, "I won't say a thing about me or where I am. You can hang up whenever you want. I'll just... tell her to stay out of downtown for a while."

"And she'll believe you?"

"She'll believe me more than you." I paused. "I hope."

The door was closed, but I could practically see Kadros looking around like he was about to caught. He sighed, opened the small viewing port on the door, and asked, "What's the address?"

If Taetran police procedure was the same, suspects in an ongoing investigation had their omni-tools bugged, only to be monitored once the clearance was given from superiors. I hadn't checked, but I had to believe they'd slipped a bug in when I was in the tank, and once I left that message for Parthus, if he got it, he'd have turned that thing on the moment he could.

If, if, if. But it was all I had.

I told him my tool's address and he punched it in, then held up his wrist to the door. It beeped. No one answered, because no one was there to. When it got sent to voicemail, I was suddenly very glad I was too lazy to ever record a personalized message.

"Hey, Sil," I said, making up a name. "It's Sor. I, uh, know it's been a while. And I'm sorry about that. But... look, I haven't been a great brother, okay? And I want to make up for it. I know you're engaged the bond to that guy, what's his name... Parthus?"

I swallowed and hoped that whoever was listening to this was paying attention.

"I'm sorry that I won't be there for the ceremony. But... it's a long story. We'll talk more when I can, but for right now, if you could listen to me for once and just... stay away from the downtown for today? If you're on the west end, you'll be fine, but just stay away from down–"

Kad pulled his arm away. "Alright," he said, keying off the tool, "that's enough."

I stared at him as he glanced around the empty corridor like Fyrran Exar himself might round a corner at any second.

He hadn't closed the viewing port.

"Hey, Kadros?"

He turned. I stuck my left hand through the small door.

"Thank you."

Kad stared at my hand, blinked once, twice, then reached up and clasped it with his own.

"Guess this makes us ev–"

I pulled, hard, and the moment I got his arm through I braced it underneath my right armpit. My left hand was still wrapped around his, so I used my right to boot up his omni-tool again and quickly flick through the file structure to find the door lock codes.

Kad was struggling, screaming some threatening epithet or another. I ignored him. Once I found the codes, I keyed them in, then disabled the overrides.

The door flew open, ripping Kad's arm from my hands. It slammed with an audible crack, pinning him against the door frame.

I walked out the half-open door and found Kad wailing, hanging from his caught arm, feet scrabbling for purchase. He almost didn't notice me plucking the gun from his hip.

A fucking Shuriken. I'd do better throwing this gun at someone than shooting it.

Kad had regained some level of control and gasped for breath in a pained way while I popped out the heat sink and gave him back his useless machine pistol.

"Thanks again, kid," I said. Then I popped him hard in the nose and he slumped into unconsciousness, hanging from his broken arm.

I was free.


	11. Blood On My Hands

I didn't have a lot of time, and I had a couple of very big problems.

Problem number one was supplies. Guns, armor, ordnance. But all their equipment was behind heavy blast doors with encrypted locks.

Problem number two—my little trick had smashed Kad's tool along with his arm, and I didn't know where to find another.

Except I did know. It just took me a minute to remember.

Amina had my Arbiter.

In my circuit of the building the first time I woke up, there were a couple doors I suspected lead to bunks or makeshift barracks. I could only hope that she'd kept it there. But it was behind a blast door same as all the rest.

I paced back and forth in front of it, rapidly running through any possibilities, when the cabling snaking out of one of the ceiling tiles caught my attention.

Of course, all the doors were powered, but I wasn't sure whether it was from a generator somewhere in the building, or if they were siphoning off the main grid. And even if I cut off the power, all that would do is make the doors impossible to open. Not like they'd fly open the moment there was a blackout.

But I knew from experience that there was a way to essentially "hotwire" a blast door. The only problem was, it was stupidly dangerous.

No turning back now, I thought.

It took a couple minutes to grab an old chair from the conference room, climb up through one of the loose metal tiles into the drop ceiling, find a live electrical panel, and begin prying it open with my bare talons.

I was working fast, but not fast enough. Every minute I spent here was another minute for Facinus to get what they wanted. I was so tired of the feeling of blood on my hands.

The panel's door removed and the inner workings exposed, I shrugged out of my jacket and slipped it over my hands. Carthaan leather was a poor conductor, a hell of a lot worse than skin and plate.

It was a crude install at best—lots of loose wires and no labels to speak of, but the setup was still fairly typical. Step-down transformer, terminal blocks, circuit breakers... it looked liked it routed power to all the doors in this hallway, but I only needed one open. The line terminating out of the top of the block had to be it, since it was closest to this panel.

Reaching in, I found the main power line, just before the transformer. I whispered a curse and started stripping the wire jacket with my talons. Once I could get at the stranded wires themselves, I gently plucked a handful free from the casing. Not enough to kill the power, but enough to give me what I needed. This close in the near dark of the crawlspace, my plates tingled with the feeling of current in the air.

Then, very carefully, I slipped my hand through the jacket sleeve and took the live wires between my fingers. I tried not to think about what would happen if they arced in this tight, enclosed metal crawlspace.

Doors stay locked when the power goes out. If there's a surge, the breaker trips. But if no one properly grounded the electronics, and your surge hits a sweet spot just below the breaker's threshold, the locks can wipe and the whole thing can revert to factory defaults.

I had to create that unlucky power surge with my bare hands.

If I were feeling full of myself, I'd say I knew exactly what I was doing and didn't have a single doubt about my abilities. But if I were feeling honest, I'd tell you I was scared shitless. You learn very early in your engineering career to respect the dangers of your craft. Learn it backwards and forwards, and double and triple check at every stage, or someone—probably you—is going home in a box.

I didn't have the time. So I took a deep breath of stifling air twinged with ozone, and touched the live wire in my hands to the appropriate door lock's power.

The circuit breaker tripped.

Carefully, I flipped it back with my free hand, and tried again. Same result.

Again. And again.

My plates were billowing heat off me, and I could feel sweat dripping down between them. Once again, very slight, almost a brush...

The breaker didn't trip. There was an audible thunk somewhere beneath me. I slipped the live wires back inside their casing and shimmied out as quickly as I could.

When I landed on the floor, I found the ring of light around the door a solid green. I punched the panel and it opened, as easy as anything, and I let myself feel triumphant for a moment before I rushed inside.

There were bunks all along the walls, and a few cots in the corner. Clearly not meant to be a full-time living situation. There was a locker at the foot of each bed and, thankfully, none of them were locked. They all trusted each other.

I threw open every one and tore out the contents. Of course Amina's was the last. Sitting neatly on top of her folded forest green coat was my Arbiter.

When I put it on, it booted up into the same holo slideshow I was watching the night that Vigilus came for me. I disabled the application and by the time I was at the armory, I had finished constructing a makeshift icebreaker. A few more subtle adjustments to the code, based on what I could figure about the door models, and I had a breaching program tailor-made to get me into places I wasn't supposed to be.

It took two minutes to crack the lock on the armory, one and a half for the supply closet, and less than sixty seconds for the command center. I gave thanks to every spirit that had ever inspired the construction of the Serrice Council Arbiter omni-tool as I gathered what I needed.

The armory had been stripped almost bare. It was all hands on deck for this operation. The only things left were a pair of Elkoss Combine boots and greaves, a civex breastplate that barely fit under my jacket, and a single, ancient Carnifex that had clearly seen better days. I threw them all on as fast as I could–anything was better than nothing–and grabbed a handful of thermal clips from the nearly-empty crate in the corner.

I took the time to steal some stims from the medical supplies while I had the chance. Stuck one in my neck and the other in my jacket pocket. The stress and the lack of sleep were starting to get to me. I couldn't afford to be slow. Not now.

On the elevator ride up to the skycar garage, I checked my omni-tool. Sure enough, the cops had bugged it. Just to make sure, I tried to call one of the local precincts. The connection wouldn't go through. Traffic overflow. I wanted to call Parthus, but I didn't have his contact information, or the time to search for it on the extranet.

The elevator doors opened and I made for the lone skycar in the center of the garage. Hacked it open and had it running in less than twenty seconds. The command center had given me the exact locations of the bombings, two major residential complexes in downtown. I'd go to the closest first.

I gunned the throttle and the car shot out of the garage like a bullet, Vallum's skyline growing larger with every second.

I knew that if the cops had been listening, and they'd understood my warning, I'd be flying into a war zone. Facinus wouldn't go quietly.

And in the back of my mind, I knew neither would she.

* * *

 

I was half-hoping I'd pick up a few cops by flying low and ignoring every traffic and speeding law I could, but no such luck. The streets were practically deserted. Businesses were closed, sidewalks were empty. Even the normally ubiquitous skycabs were nowhere to be found.

It was the middle of the day in Vallum and the city was empty.

But it wasn't, really. Every single building was packed with life. That's what they were counting on.

Rounding a corner, I hit the brakes hard and almost came to a stop. It took me a second to figure out exactly what I was seeing.

Four skycars at ground level, two unmarked parked across the front entrance to the Second Millennium residential complex, one marked as Vallum Security parked in the middle of the street, and a third unmarked black one further up the road. There were at least three armored turians with guns behind the first two, two uniformed cops behind their car, and a pair of armed men in plainclothes ducked behind the black car.

They were all shooting at each other. Facinus and the cops and... Vigilus, maybe. I hadn't thought they'd operate so openly. I had also hoped my warning would have gotten more than a single squadcar here by now, but maybe Parthus or the cops were having their own problems.

But I didn't care, because it didn't matter. What mattered was getting inside that building.

So I shoved the throttle forward, and aimed for the door. But not before disabling most of the safety systems in the car. Seat belts and kinetic dampeners were one thing, but I couldn't have impact foam filling the interior. And this was gonna be a hard crash.

I think I might have blacked out for a second when my forehead hit the control panel... but I do remember the scraping sound of the car sliding across the ground, and the crunch of metal and glass as it barreled through the other two. I even remember hearing the front doors of the building shatter as I came to a stop.

At least I was together enough to click the release on my seat belt and force open the door. I shook my head hard to try and clear it, and it was around then that I realized without a great deal of alarm that I was taking fire.

The three Facinus had apparently managed to dive out of the way. Two were still preoccupied with the cops while the third was leveling her rifle at me.

I felt three rounds bite into my chest as I drew a bead on the visor of her helmet. The Carnifex boomed twice in my hands. One round dropped her shields, the other pierced the glass. She staggered and seemed to have trouble keeping her balance. Then she dropped like she'd had her strings cut, and I followed close behind, folding to my knees like a cheap suit.

My pectoral plates hurt like a son of a bitch—of course I'd catch a few slugs in one of the places that hadn't fully healed—but when I ran a hand over my chest, it came away clean. The civex wasn't much, but it had done its job.

Carnifex only had a couple of shots left, so I crawled over to the body and grabbed the Vindicator, plus a couple more heat sinks off her belt. The other two had taken notice of me, but they were on the opposite side of two skycars, and with Vigilus behind them, they couldn't do more than take a couple cursory potshots at me.

I fired off a few bursts from the rifle as I retreated inside. Might have wounded one, I wasn't sure, but it was all I could do. Even if I could spare the time to drop them and Vigilus both, I certainly couldn't count on the cops to understand my noble intentions.

I tossed away the now-empty Vindicator and swapped a fresh sink into the Carnifex. Close quarters, a burst rifle wouldn't do me much good, and I'd always been best with a pistol anyway. The only turian alive who didn't see the point in overkill.

The lobby was almost untouched, apart from my grand entrance through the front doors. There were two bodies over by the main desk, blood pooling around their heads. Two entry wounds each. Double tapped. No chances taken.

My first thought was where I'd plant rig explosives to bring down the building, but then I remembered that I wasn't the one bringing it down. It was a bunch of grunts and amateurs. I had to think like them.

If I were stupid, I thought, where would I plant a bomb?

The answer seemed obvious. I headed for the service area next to the elevators and descended into the basement. There were two levels below ground before you reached Vallum's underground. I had to scour each.

Or I would, if I hadn't burst through a door from the stairwell and nearly run into a barefaced turian with cold grey eyes.

Sev reacted quicker than I would have expected. He had a machine pistol in his hands, and brought it up fast. I managed to shove it aside as he fired, and the staccato sound echoed loudly in the empty hallway. My own shots bounced off the floor and walls as I tried to stick my pistol in close, but Sev managed to wrap an arm around my hand and brace it against his side. I tried to rip his weapon away with one hand, but he had a firm grip and was already trying to maneuver in close to trip me up with his feet.

I threw my head at his but he leaned back enough that it was a glancing blow at best. We staggered back and forth, wrestling for a handful of seconds, until I decided to hell with it and booted up my Arbiter, omni-blade protocol loaded and waiting.

It cut through the machine pistol like it wasn't even there. Sev jumped back as I swung, and took my pistol with him. It clattered to the floor, still intact, somewhere off to the side. I didn't look. I kept my eyes on him.

The bareface booted up his own 'tool, omni-blade extending, held out and at an angle. His stance shifted, knees bent, center of gravity nice and low.

We circled slowly, sizing each other up.

Sev had youth, efficiency, and proper CQC training. He looked at me like the Vigilus torturer, like a series of parts he had to break. He was committed, and merciless, and unfeeling.

I was old and tired, running on stims and still not fully healed from a lengthy and brutal interrogation. Even at my best, he was faster and probably stronger.

But no matter how ruthless he was, I knew I was meaner.

I had nothing to lose. And that righteous fury was still boiling in my blood.

One way or another, this fight wouldn't last long.


	12. Old and Weak

An omni-blade is a monomolecular piece of silicon-carbide flash-forged by the fabricator on the tool, searing hot and sharp enough to cut through damn near anything.

They’re also incredibly fragile. In basic, you’re taught never to twist the blade. Stabbing or slicing, piercing or cutting, it has to be a smooth motion with proper follow-through. Or else your blade shatters, and while your tool forges another one, you’re defenseless.

In the engineering corps, we liked to get fancy. Design different sorts of blades, devise new combat protocols. Of course, ideally you wanted to kill the enemy before they got that close, but being prepared was something you took pride in. And it filled the off hours.

Some people played kepesh-yakshi. Others built model ships. We thought up and coded increasing violent and innovative ways to kill someone with a swing of your arm. Everyone needs a hobby.

My preferred blade was forked, with an extra incendiary application. The thin coating of fuel burned as it made contact with air, hotter than the normal byproduct of the flash-forging process.

Sev’s wasn’t quite so ostentatious, but it was modified. Slightly longer than the standard issue, and double-edged. Looked versatile, but more for stabbing than slicing.

Neither of us was very eager to make a move. We both knew that all it took was one good hit.

He swung and missed. I tried to chop at his knee, he pulled it away, then swung hard for my face. I leaned away and sliced on his backswing. He jumped back.

In the space of seconds, we’d nearly killed each other twice.

We started circling again.

This couldn’t go on forever. I didn’t think Sev was trying to stall me–he didn’t seem the type–but I had to get to that bomb, and he was in my way.

It was all or nothing. So that’s how I had to fight.

I feinted left, then shifted right, retreating slightly towards the wall of the corridor. Sev took the opportunity I had presented him and pressed forward, thrusting his blade straight for my heart.

I did the last thing he expected me to and charged, spinning just out of the way. His blade scored a line across my breastplate and nearly took some of my jacket with it while I grabbed his wrist with my right hand and stomped on his foot.

He spun to face me fully and grabbed for my tool. We struggled, inches apart, while he tried to pry his hand from my grasp and cut out my legs from under me, and simultaneously pressed my own blade towards my face.

We spun again and I nearly tripped. I found myself pressed up against the wall, rapidly losing leverage with no chance of escape.

Sev pressed hard, grey eyes boring into mine. The muscles in my arms screamed in protest. I could feel the heat from my blade against my face.

My hand shifted against his wrist and with a twist, his omni-tool came loose and clattered to the floor. Sev didn’t miss a beat–he tore his hand away and pressed it next to his other, determined now to kill me with my own blade.

Just before it touched plate, my fingers twitched and it disappeared. I grabbed the back of his head and pulled him in close, foreheads almost touching in a strangely intimate gesture.

Then I closed my eyes, looked away, and twitched my fingers again.

I heard the snap-hiss of the ignition and felt the heat wash against the side of my face, hot enough to burn. Sev was screaming, trying to push me away, but he was panicked and flailing. And I was stronger than I looked.

When the screaming trailed off into helpless gurgles, I keyed off the plasma torch application and let him fall to the floor. I touched the side of my head and found it tender, but otherwise intact. Sev hadn’t been so lucky.

I walked over and collected his omni-tool from where it had rolled—an old model Savant that looked like it had seen a lot of use—and my Carnifex, and then stood over him.

He was mewling and gurgling on the floor, still alive and conscious. What was left of his face was unpleasant to look at, and the smell was even worse. He’d be dead of shock inside of five minutes.

The part of me that wanted to walk away and leave him, I wasn’t proud of. I spared him a single bullet, and then continued down the hallway.

It wasn’t as cramped and claustrophobic as Vallum’s underground, but the sub-basements were still crammed full of utility and service areas. It had the usual systems for water filtration, waste disposal and power generation that came standard in major residential complexes. Stuff meant to ease the load on the grid and contribute excess to the city as whole. This meant large rooms of water tanks, industrial-grade matter recyclers, and generator turbines.

If I were stupid, where would I plant a bomb? By the mains, of course.

Natural gas held in smaller tanks on site before being processed into electricity by the generators. That room was usually near the outer edge of the floor plan, walls weren’t nearly as thick… ignite the mains, blow the generators, set off an explosive chain reaction that brings down several floors above and weakens the foundation. Crude, and not a guaranteed collapse, but big and loud and very impressive. They knew that much. They wouldn’t have gone to all that trouble and not have thought at least that far.

I followed the helpful signs that must have made this damned easy for Facinus. The whole basement had an industrial sort of background noise, but it grew louder as I drew closer to my destination. Two corpses, riddled with rounds, slumped beside the industrial-grade blast door leading to the mains. It was already hacked, and slid open as I approached. The sound inside was almost deafening.

Thick concrete pillars held up numerous massive generators the size of shuttles. The room was surrounded by pipes erupting from the ground, snaking their way up the walls into the generators above. Maintenance catwalks stretched between them like webs, with only a handful of ladders leading up to them.

Inside, I could barely hear myself think. It didn’t take me long to find what I was looking for. Just two of them, armor clad and armed, over by the far wall. One in purple armor was working on a large, matte black torpex charge. The other, in bright crimson red, was standing standing by his shoulder, barking orders over the din.

Of course he turned and saw me before I could get in close and end things quickly. He brought up an assault rifle, some model of Phaeston, and fired. I scrambled for cover, but not before I put two clean rounds into the skull of his compatriot. He slumped to the ground in a heap next to the torpex charge he’d been trying to arm.

I popped the heat sink in my Carnifex and replaced it. I was confident enough in my accuracy that I wouldn’t hit any of the mains. Part of me longed for Sev’s bisected machine pistol. Against a rifle, it would have helped to put more metal in the air.

The other man, aided by his helmet’s speaker, shouted over the noise of the generators.

“Somehow I knew it would be you. I knew it would come to this.”

I grinned humorlessly and blew out a breath. “Glad to prove you right, Exar,” I shouted.

His shots scraped the edge of the pillar, spitting out columns of dust that billowed in the air and were pulled apart by the currents of the generators. I shifted to my left and edged around the side of the square pillar, peeking. The room was long and wide and filled with cover. I didn’t see him.

“And yet despite my total lack of surprise,” Fyrran Exar shouted from somewhere, “I cannot help but wonder why.”

“Yeah?” I clutched the pistol in both hands and moved up, scanning left and right for a flash of crimson.

“It was a lifetime’s worth of debt you owed me, and I chose to forgive it.” The ambient noise made it impossible to pinpoint where he was shouting from unless I was close. “You could have left this world you profess to hate and gone back to your pathetic shell of a life without lifting a finger.”

“Private sector’s not so bad, once you get used to it,” I said. I caught a glimpse of red and spun, firing twice. I hit nothing but concrete, and took cover myself.

“Why are you here, Sartorus?” he asked, superiority mingling with curiosity. “This fight isn’t yours. It never was.”

I checked my heat sinks. Two more after the loaded one, and in that old model Carnie, only five shots apiece. “If you’re trying to convince me to walk away, it won’t work.”

“Oh, there’s no walking away now, Sartorus. This a sword you’ve already fallen on. I’m merely curious why you chose to die.”

I lifted my gun. In that moment, I was more concerned with watching my back than my words, and without thinking, I had a moment of startling honesty.

“Never seemed like I had a choice.”

There was a long moment of silence between us, as much as anything could be described as silent in that room. I burst from cover and charged his last position, shifting left around one pillar, then right around another.

When Fyrran spoke, he sounded a lot closer.

“That,” he said, “I understand.”

Gun raised, I rounded a corner. There was nothing there.

Then I looked down and saw his helmet.

I spun just in time to catch a few more rounds in my chest and fire off a full clip in his general direction. Then I slumped behind the pillar, cursing violently. I kicked his stupid helmet away for good measure.

“Have to do better than that!” I shouted, trying to hide the pain in my voice.

“Don’t worry,” Fyr shouted back, his voice echoing loudly through his nearby helmet. “I can.”

I ran another hand across my chest and this time it came away blue. I spat and grabbed a medigel packet off my belt, tore it open and stuck it beneath the breastplate. My chest felt like it was on fire, and it was hard to breath, but I knew it could only be a flesh wound. If I were dying, it would hurt less.

Much as I hated to admit it, though, Exar was right. I had been trying my damnedest this whole time, and he’d practically been toying with me. It almost felt as though he were indulging himself.

If I were going to have any chance at winning this, I’d have to level the playing field. And then I’d have to cheat.

An idea occurred, so risky and so stupid it shocked even me. But it was better odds than a drawn out gunfight with a seasoned veteran, so I did it anyway.

I booted up the Savant and overclocked it. It didn’t take long. Then I keyed up a minor overload protocol, and set it to repeat if its target was still online. Then I set the target as itself.

The feedback loop had repeated countless times by the time I had the thing off my wrist and in my hand.

“Hey, Exar!” I shouted. “How about we settle this the old-fashioned way?”

“I think we’ll settle this whatever way I want us to,” he said, sounding a whole lot closer than he had before.

“Well,” I said, hefting the tool, “too bad!”

I threw it towards the center of the room, where it would have widest coverage. It bounced along the floor and spun a couple times on its back before it exploded in a small shower of sparks.

Then the whole room went dark, and there was a sudden, deafening silence.

After a moment the emergency lighting strips around the edges of the floor and ceiling started brightening. There was an alarm blaring in the distance, somewhere else in the basement. I imagined everyone in the building must have been real confused when their power went out.

Fyr leapt out from behind a pillar to my right, rifle in his hands. I lifted my pistol. We both pulled our triggers.

Nothing happened.

My jury-rigged EMP had done the job. No electrical current in the guns meant no charged eezo, which meant no mass effect, which meant no bullets.

I grinned at him and stood up from my crouch, tossing my gun to the side.

“Like I said.” I cracked my knuckles. “We do this my way.”

Fyr stared at me with his one eye, as steely as the plate over the other, then threw his gun to the ground and advanced briskly.

“I’ll make this quick,” he said coldly, and then he struck.

Fyrran Exar had about ten years on me. Maybe more. But while I’d gotten soft in the private sector, he’d been tempered by war. There wasn’t a single part of him that wasn’t hard as steel.

I knew the moment his fist connected with my sternum that this wasn’t a level playing field at all. Not even close.

He kicked hard for my knee and I just barely avoided seeing it snap backwards. His hands reached out to grab my elbow in a joint lock and I slipped free by slicing my other hand towards his eye.

I kept retreating, and Exar kept advancing. Laser-focused and unyielding.

“This was your plan?” he barked, sounding insulted. “What advantage could you possibly have now?”

I forced a grin and said, “Depth perception.”

He growled and charged. I feinted to his left with a hook, and he turned, overcompensating the block, leaving him open for a short jab. It staggered him slightly, and I capitalized, pressing forward.

It was starting to feel like a real fight, until he braced his back foot and raised his front, knee slamming into my stomach. I crumpled to the ground and he kicked me again, sending me rolling across the floor.

When I looked up, he was standing over me, touching the inside of his mandible. His finger came away blue.

“Not many people bloody me twice,” he said.

Then his foot shot out into my jaw. I rolled onto my back and tasted blood. I felt him lean down, grab me by the cowl, and lift me up, my feet scrabbling for purchase, only for him to throw me back onto the hard concrete floor.

Fyr climbed on top of me, one knee against my chest. It hurt more than you’d imagine, and you could probably imagine a lot. He started punching me, hard. Right, left, right, left. I blocked, at first, hands and forearms up around my face, but you get your skull rattled enough times and it becomes hard to even think, let alone properly protect yourself.

Finally, he stopped. I coughed and spat blood on the concrete floor next to me. Fyr snaked his hands in through my guard and wrapped them around my neck. They began to squeeze.

“Pathetic,” he growled, squeezing harder.

I wanted to fight back, but he wasn’t close enough. He had to be closer. I’d only get one shot. It had to be a certainty, or I was dead.

But he was also squeezing very hard. I tried to pry his hands off but the man had a grip like a vice. I realized he wasn’t willing to take the time to suffocate me. He was trying to snap my neck.

“Look at you,” he bit out, watching my feeble attempts to free myself. “You’re no Taetran. You wear our markings with disdain, you flee from any cause higher than yourself… I’m doing the whole galaxy a favor by removing you from it.”

My vision started to darken at the edges. He was still at arm’s length, still not close enough. With what little coherence I had left, I mused that I was going to die in a dark Vallum basement. Fyr might as well have left me with Vigilus.

Then he leaned in close, his breath hot against my face, one eye bright and furious.

“You’re old and weak,” he hissed. “Be grateful that I made this quick.”

He pressed his thumb talons into my throat. I closed my eyes and released my left hand from his wrist. My fingers flickered, and I drove my fist between his arms and up into his chin.

The average soldier, the grunt on the front line, doesn’t know half of what the engineering corps has to learn. They can run a breaching program, hack a terminal maybe, or produce a concussive round or grenade at best. Omni-tools are standard issue, but a soldier only has to learn what it does. A engineer has to learn the how and the why.

So there’s a lot of misconceptions out there. People see the holograms, the haptic interface, and thinks they get the gist. Some even go so far as to think that the omni-blade is a sort of hard-light projection. In fact, most of the holograms the tool produces aren’t even necessary. They’re simply a visual guide to the controls, which are actually tiny warp fields surrounded by the holos. A good engineer doesn’t need to look at his tool to know what commands he’s inputting, and a great one can work by instinct and muscle memory alone.

And each model of omni-tool has its own little quirks. Bluewires have an input latency and poorly designed file structures. The Logic Arrest has exceptional diagnostic and processor efficiency, and the shield diagnostic and maintenance systems on a Nexus are almost peerless.

The Arbiter is a newer model, high-end and damned expensive. One of those “kitchen sink” approaches to technology. It has everything and then some, including features most people will never need to make use of. Waterproof up to twenty atmospheres, timekeeping aligned to a satellite tracking the movement of the galactic core…

And EMP shielding for everything but the holo-projectors.

Fyr’s eye went wide. His mouth opened and closed, mandibles flapping uselessly. Slowly, his grip loosened around my neck and I sucked in deep swallows of air as blood poured from his throat and mouth.

In a handful of moments, our positions were reversed, and I was kneeling over him, fist still buried in his neck. He looked so damned surprised.

“I may be old and weak,” I croaked, gasping for breath. Then I leaned in close. “But at least I’m not stupid.”

I pulled the blade smoothly from his throat. The thin coating of blue blood boiling and dripping from the superheated surface was the only visible evidence of the monomolecular silicon-carbide edge. It dissolved, and the blood fell to the floor in a spatter of blue.

Fyr coughed and sputtered, reaching for his neck and his cowl. Unlike Sev, I felt no guilt in letting him die at his own pace.

It was only after I saw his left hand drop to the floor that I realized he’d been going for something in his cowl rather than trying to pointlessly staunch the flow of blood.

I didn’t need to look at his face to know what it was, but I did anyway.

He gurgled one last ragged, blood-soaked breath, and smiled.

I was halfway to the detonator in his hands before I realized it was too late. Last thing I remember is a flare of white, broken by the shade of the pillar to our right, and a deafening noise as the pressure wave shook the building.

Then, nothing.


	13. All Out of Pity

I'm not sure exactly how long I was out, but I woke up with a gasp, on my side and half-submerged in water. I could barely think, let alone move, and I started to panic. Which is the opposite of what you want to do in a collapse. After a few seconds of blind terror, I got a grip on myself, took a few slow, deep breaths, and considered my situation.

Luck had favored me again—the pillar I'd been next to had withstood the blast, and the catwalk and generator that fell on top of me had left a small space of air at the base. Fyr's corpse was somewhere to my left, buried underneath tons of metal, but I was alive.

It was pitch black but for faint light filtering in through the cracks and crevices of the rubble around me. Somewhere in front of me, it seemed stronger. I pulled myself forward and cried out when my left spur caught against some bit of rebar. Probably broken. I gently shifted it loose, caught my breath, and started crawling forward again.

The water was nearly up to my cowl. It was cold and didn't help my progress any, but it didn't smell stagnant, so it probably hadn't been long since the blast. At one point the confines became so cramped I had to hold my breath and crawl under the water. Claustrophobia was never one of my fears, but buried alive, with water rising around me, I could feel my heart thundering in my chest.

Eventually, I got enough room to pull myself up to my feet and start climbing along a piece of fallen catwalk. The light was stronger here, coming from somewhere above. The metal creaked and groaned beneath me. I ignored it, like I ignored the pain in my legs and my shoulder and my chest.

I pulled myself through a gap in two massive pieces of broken concrete, and nearly tumbled down a small mountain of rubble. I'd made it out. And now I could see what had happened.

The explosion had taken out the entire generator room, and most of the sub-basements with it. The initial explosion had propelled debris up and out, taking the ceiling and several floors with it, before collapsing in on itself. You could see a sort of cross-section of the various levels of the building where the floors and ceilings were still intact. Overcast daylight was streaming in through a hole that had blown in the side of the building above street level, where the smoke from the fires was billowing out.

They were everywhere. Small ones, mostly, but a large wall of it where the gas had caught. The only thing preventing it from spreading and weakening the foundation any further were the water mains, pouring in torrents from massive pipes that had been on the other side of the wall and one level up from where the bomb had been planted. Whether by accident or design, the fire was contained.

Not that it was much comfort.

There were bodies everywhere. Poking out from beneath metal or concrete, furniture or foundation. The first two floors in this corner of the complex looked like they'd been fully occupied.

I sat there on my knees, looking around at the smoking, burning ruin, and I knew it was my fault.

If I had just killed that son of a bitch when he was bleeding out on the floor... if I hadn't given them EMP shielded torpex... if I hadn't come here at all...

Maybe they'd all still be dead. Maybe more. Didn't make me any less responsible.

Above the roaring of the fire and the rushing of the water, I heard them. People outside, on the street. Others down in the basements, or in the ruins. People crying out in pain, or grief, or despair. Calling for help.

And then I checked my omni-tool—thanking the spirits for the fucking waterproofing—and saw that I'd been out about fifteen minutes.

I hadn't heard another explosion. Not on the way here, or since I'd arrived. If the second bombing hadn't happened yet, I could still stop it.

Pushing myself to my feet, I jostled my spur against the concrete and nearly collapsed. It was still encased in the greave, and I didn't feel any of the characteristic numbness of nerve damage. But it hurt like a motherfucker. And I needed to move.

Taking off the armor was out of the question. Even if it was waterlogged, it might be the only thing holding me together. Just because it still had feeling in it didn't mean the damn thing might not be hanging on by a thread.

I ripped off a tube of medigel from my belt and stuck it into one of the auxiliary injection ports on the calf. Then I took my last remaining stim and jammed it into my neck.

I gasped and nearly threw up. My chest and stomach and shoulders all seized up, and it took me a minute of leaning against a piece of ceiling before I could breath easily again.

Stims can be dangerous if you're not careful, and I wasn't being careful. If I pushed myself any harder, I was going to break. Not that I cared. If I lasted long enough to stop it, if I could fix my fuck-ups and do something good for once... it didn't matter.

It was as good a cause as any to die for, I figured.

The only thing left to consider was the fastest route to the second target. I looked up at the sky through the tear in the side of the building. I'd totaled my skycar. It was a long way by foot and by now the cops would probably be getting the idea. The whole downtown would be swarming with them. I doubted they'd let me run on by.

I looked down. A uniformed hand protruded from the rubble. Probably one of the poor bastards who'd been fighting to get inside. An omni-tool sparked and flickered against the wrist.

Every uniform got an omni-tool. And every omni-tool had maps of the underground.

I pushed myself to my feet, tested my weight, and started climbing down the wreckage towards it. I tore the tool free of the corpse and found it barely functional, but enough to transfer the maps to my Arbiter. Another handful of seconds prying the dead man's Predator from his armor, and I was heading for the exposed sub-basements.

Once I got inside, it didn't take long to find a maintenance shaft to the underground. I tried to be careful on the ladders, but I still ended up bumping my spur a few times. Medigel was doing something to the pain, but not a lot. Not enough to help.

The tunnels below were pitch dark, thanks to my EMP or the torpex. I booted up a flashlight app alongside the map and started running. Without having to follow the street layouts, it wouldn't take more than a few minutes to get to the second target.

That was when I heard voices echoing through the dark.

I keyed off the tool and ducked into an alcove, snug between what looked like old matter processing equipment. Dozens of footsteps thundered in the underground, and I held my breath as a whole squad of militia ran right past me, not a meter away.

After I was certain they were out of earshot and no more were coming, I pulled myself out of the tight space and started running again. This happened twice more—with a handful of public security officers, and a team of what looked like paramedics. Both times I held my breath, and both times they kept their eyes forward.

By the time I'd gotten to the target, I was half-convinced I wouldn't be able to pull it off. It felt like so long since I'd escaped my cell, how could I be certain they hadn't set this thing up on a timer and left already? Would I be able to keep it together enough to disarm a torpex charge? And if they were still here, did I have enough stims left in my body to win another fight?

Doesn't matter. Bridge is burning, path only leads forward, one foot follows the other. Doesn't matter. I repeated it like a mantra, like a prayer, like an anthem or a battlecry. Doesn't matter.

I crawled out of a maintenance shaft in one of the sub-basements. Very similar to the last building. Except everything looked intact. I wasn't too late.

Drawing my pistol and pushing myself up, I started following the signs again until I saw an open door and heard voices inside.

"—sure this is the right place?"

I pressed up against the wall and peeked inside. It was a long room, with two branches at the opposite end going left and right. Large machines lined either side of the room, might have been generators or matter recyclers. But they were old and rusted. Whatever function they used to serve, they no longer did.

Two of them, like before. One standing, one crouched, both in digital urban camouflage. One didn't have a helmet, probably had to ditch it to arm the bomb. They were planting the charge against one wall, between two of the larger machines.

"For the last time, Jar," she said, "I'm positive! This will do the most structural damage. Now if you're not going to help, then shut up!"

My hands tightened around the grip of my pistol.

Amina.

Jar glanced at the opposite exit, then at mine. I ducked back behind the wall, breath hard and heavy in my chest. He still had his helmet. If I could get two clean shots at his visor—

An explosion shook the building. Too small, too slight to be anything serious. It sounded distant, like it had come from outside.

"Shit," I heard Jar curse. "Shit, shit, shit!" Boots shuffled on concrete. "How much longer?"

"Not long," she said, clipped and curt.

"Then I'm going up. See what the hell's going on."

I tensed, until I heard his footsteps receding, headed for the opposite end of the room.

"The moment you've got that thing armed, you get topside, clear?"

"Clear."

"I mean it, girl."

"I said clear!"

A few seconds of silence, and then Jar left.

I reconsidered my options, and I did the only thing that felt right—I lowered my gun and stepped inside.

Amina glanced up. She hurriedly grabbed something from the ground near her feet and pulled her pistol off her hip, stepping away from the charge.

"Stay back!" she barked, pistol in one hand and detonator in the other, extended towards the charge in a threatening manner. "I'll—"

She took a couple seconds to recognize me. I must have looked like shit.

"Spirits," she whispered, lowering her arms slightly. "Sor...?"

The look of pure incredulity on her face almost made me want to laugh. The concern that crept in at the edges of her subvocals, however, made me furious.

"Fancy meeting you here," I drawled, taking another slow step forward.

"What... what happened?"

"A lot." Another step.

Amina blinked. She seemed to remember where she was. She raised the pistol again. I didn't react.

"How did you—" She cut herself off. "Where's Kad?"

"Dumb and trusting," I said, taking another step. "Kid's a better turian than all of us."

"What did you do to him?" she shouted.

There was a pistol drawn on me and a detonator for a bomb in her hand. Her concern for the boy made me even angrier than her concern for me.

"Let's just say he'll need a new arm," I growled, squeezing the gun by my side. "Exar wasn't so lucky."

Amina's eyes widened, and her mandibles dropped. "Fyr?"

I took one more careful step forward. "It's over, Amina."

She took a step back, eyes flashing with sudden fury. "What are you doing?"

Casually, I raised my weapon. The pistol in her hand jumped as she twitched nervously.

"What does it look like?"

Amina stared at the pistol in my hands. Distantly, I realized the lights on her armor were out, that her shields must be offline. But it wouldn't have mattered at this range.

"Drop the gun," I said.

Her breath came faster. Her eyes were far away and she was shaking her head.

"This isn't right," she said quietly, desperately, almost choking on her words. "This isn't what's supposed to happen..."

"Drop the gun, Amina," I repeated.

She shook her head harder. Her mandibles fluttered. When her eyes found mine, she looked so scared.

"This isn't how it's supposed to end!" she shouted at me, voice cracking.

I was running on stims and fury, beaten and bruised and broken after crawling from burning ruins surrounded by corpses that I'd had a hand in creating. I was all out of pity and understanding.

"If you thought this was going to end any other way, then you really are delusional." I squeezed the grip hard. "Drop. The gun."

Amina's mouth opened and closed wordlessly. She took deep breaths, sucking in air through her mouth. She was panicking, I could see it. I could see the next few seconds where she turned and ran, and I shot her in the leg. Where she dropped the detonator and it rolled out of her reach. Where I walked over and kicked her gun away, and then heaved her arm over my shoulder and carried her up and out and into the street.

But all of a sudden, she seemed to calm. She exhaled a stuttering breath, and looked away from my gun and into my eyes.

She wasn't far away anymore. She was right there. All of her. I could see her in the bar, in the park, in my room. Everything she'd ever said to me and every time she'd ever looked at me.

A million thoughts and feelings flooded my mind. A million things I wanted to say, to shout, to plead or demand. They all began the same way.

And in the end, that's all that came out.

"Don't," I told her, subvocals thick with something like... everything.

Amina stared at me. Down the barrel of my gun. Down the sights of her own. Her thumb brushed along the detonator in her hand. She looked almost calm. Like she knew what was about to happen, and had made her peace with it.

She tightened her grip on her pistol. I curled my finger on the trigger.

"Don't."

She closed her eyes.

I didn't close mine.


	14. All We've Got

The gun beeped and vented in my hand.

My mind went blank. It felt like I'd whited out. I don't know how long I stood there. Too long. Not long enough.

Everything took on an unreal quality. Either from the stims or the blood loss or the lack of sleep or the stress of... everything. It was like dreaming. A dim part of me hoped I'd open my eyes and wake up in my hotel bedroom with her on my arm.

I lowered my gun and took slow, measured steps forward. I couldn't hear anything, not even the pounding of my own heart that had been so loud a few seconds ago. But I could see. I didn't want to, but I could see.

Her eyes were closed. Her expression relaxed, almost peaceful. You'd have thought she was sleeping if it weren't for the neat little hole in the middle of her forehead. Right between the browplates.

I always was a good shot.

Wish I could tell you how I felt. Wish I could tell you I wailed and howled, threw up what was left of my stomach and stuck the business end of my gun in my mouth. Or that I was mad with fury, stormed up and started shooting at any Facinus or Vigilus I could see. That I was relieved that I'd stopped them, that I'd saved lives, that I'd done something good.

But I didn't feel anything. I was empty. Null.

I had saved her life.

And then I killed her.

Felt like I'd all done since I'd landed on Taetrus was kill people.

I could say that it wasn't my fault. That circumstances had demanded action of me, and I had taken it. It was a good excuse. But would she have shot me? Would she have triggered the bomb? Or would she have hesitated, left an opening, or given up? I didn't really know.

Standing over her body, looking down at her placid expression, I realized I never would.

I don't know what it was that brought me out of it. Maybe some other explosion from up on the street. I blinked and felt my eyes sting as I turned my attention to the bomb.

She'd been about to set the timer when I'd walked in, but had been forced to resort to manual detonation. The setup was simple, amateur-hour stuff, and since I'd handled torpex before, I knew what to break. I reached in to the open panel on the charge, found the wires leading to the receivers, and yanked them loose. Bomb disarmed. Simple as that.

I turned back to her body. And after a moment's consideration, I did what I felt I had to.

Her detonator went in my jacket pocket. I dropped my gun, pulled hers gently from her hand, then carefully, haltingly picked her up in my arms.

I had to draw her close to my chest to make sure I didn't drop her. I cradled the back of her head in one hand and the crook of her knees in the other, and started the long walk outside.

Two long corridors. Four flights of stairs. Passed a couple more corpses on the way. Security, or bystanders. I didn't stop to look. Just kept walking.

Warmth flowed over my hand. By the time I was in the lobby it was leaving a trail of blue, dripping from the sleeve of my jacket. I didn't care.

I stepped outside through open doors. Smoke billowed from two flaming skycars, one embedded in the second floor of the building across the street. The scorching and damage they'd done, I guessed they'd been loaded with explosives. Patrol cars were everywhere now, along with emergency shuttles, and every light was flashing. Uniforms were running back and forth, pulling citizens out of the building, shouting into omni-tools and communicators. Flurries were falling from an overcast sky, and in the distance, I heard gunfire.

No one had noticed me. Too busy with everything else. I made it onto the sidewalk and fell to my knees, laying her body on the cracked asphalt. Then I took the detonator from my pocket, wiped the grip against my jacket lining, and rolled it into a nearby sewer grate.

Maybe I wanted to preserve her as something innocent in all this. Or maybe I wanted to take her precious martyrdom from her out of spite. I don't know.

There's a lot I don't know, I guess.

Despite all the commotion, everything seemed so quiet. Looking at her again, the markings on her face told her story. Taetrus. Eluria. Diluvian Wildlands. Madra. Green like her eyes. Like the coat she wore outside the station. Or the sash she wore in the bar that night.

I'm not a stranger to blood. I've taken lives almost casually. But I'd never seen the journey to the bullet laid so bare.

My thumb brushed absently across her cheek, tracing a line of blue beneath green. I opened my mouth to apologize.

"Don't move! Hands in the air!"

I raised my hands and placed them behind my head. The cop behind me shoved me to the ground. I got one last long look at Amina's face while he cuffed me. Then he dragged me to my feet and shoved me forward.

They had collected more than a few. I was surprised. There was a whole line of them, guarded by several cops with assault weapons. Hands cuffed behind them, blood staining their faces, clothes, and armor. A mixture of Facinus and Vigilus, from the way they were dressed and how they pointedly ignored each other. Some were kneeling because they couldn't stand, others held their heads high.

Like Jar. One broken mandible and a bleeding from a wound on his temple. Looking as proud and stoic a revolutionary as you could want. Until he caught a glimpse of me when the cop pushed me into the line.

His mandibles flared and his mouth opened and closed wordlessly. I forced the best shit-eating grin I could, and the look he gave me said he wanted me dead more than anything in the galaxy. It wasn't much, but it was a comfort.

After twenty minutes of standing there, the gunfire in the distance growing fainter, they started to move us into one of the prisoner transports. A hand gripped my elbow and brought me up short. One of the guards turned questioningly.

"It's alright, sergeant," Parthus said, "I've got this one."

The sergeant nodded and saluted as we turned away. I was directed to one of the cars on the outskirts of the plaza. Unmarked but for the light flashing on top of it.

Parthus let me go and canted his hips against the hood. I followed suit as he reached for something in his pocket, regarding the scene before me with a dull sort of coherence.

He held out a flask. I dipped my head towards it and took a swig. Malt liquor. Something sweet. I didn't like it. I drank it anyway.

After Parthus took a swig of his own, he winced and shook his head. "What a fucking mess."

I nodded.

"Hasn't been an attack this scale since..." He sighed and shook his head again, then took another swig.

The fires were about out. I looked up into the sky but apart from the snow, I couldn't see any smoke from the first bombing. Maybe they'd gotten that fire contained too.

"Got your message," he said, fiddling with the cap on his flask. "Both of them. Risky."

"No other choice." My voice sounded strange. Too loud in my ears.

I thought he might snap at me. Say I'd had a choice from the beginning. He didn't. There was a pause, and all he said was, "Right."

For a minute we watched the police go about their business. Watched the medics treat and triage the wounded. Watched the civilians file out of the building, help the old and infirm, comfort the young. The shock of it was still sinking in, but it all seemed too easy. Too rote. As though this happened every day.

And somehow, that was the saddest thing.

"You know I have to bring you in."

I swallowed. "Yeah."

"And you know that regardless of how much you cooperate, you're still going to be treated as an accessory."

"I'll cooperate."

I could feel Parthus staring at me. I kept my eyes forward.

"How fast do you think the Hierarchy will respond?" I asked.

He made a sound that was something between a cough and a laugh. "You think they will?"

I tore myself away and looked at him. Parthus looked as haggard a man as I'd ever seen.

"The Hierarchy's barely recovered from the war," he said. "Thirty years and the homeworld's just starting to regain some of its former glory. You think they'll spare any effort for a backwater colony? You think they'll even acknowledge an act of sedition?"

I blinked. Parthus' mandibles twisted into a bitter frown.

"It'd take something far more dramatic than a few residential bombings. Probably another suicide ship. Until then... we're on our own."

He almost laughed again. "We're all we've got," he said, raising his flask. "All we're ever gonna get."

Parthus took one last swig, capped and stowed his flask, then pushed himself off the hood.

"Alright. Let's go."

I took one last look at the damage. The buildings. The people. The sky, broken clouds where the flurries were still falling. Then Parthus directed me towards the back of the car, opened the door and ducked my head inside.

When it closed, I rested my head against the window. The skycar's engine ignited, and we rose slowly into the air.

Before I fell into a hard, dreamless sleep, I looked for Amina's body on the ground below. I couldn't find it.


	15. Epilogue: The Truth

The room looks exactly the same as when I left it. Bare but for a table, two chairs, and a security filament up in the corner recording everything. The holo of the far wall is imperfect—you can see it flicker along the edges occasionally.

I pick at the frayed and tattered remains of my jacket. Every once in a while I look down into my lap and take stock of it. I could probably still salvage the thing. It would cost more than it took to make, but that hardly matters.

The only door unlocks loudly and slides open. I expect Parthus again, for another round of questions, but I'm not surprised when someone else walks in.

"Well, well," I drawl, "I was wondering when you'd get here."

The heavily armored guard stands by the door, hands empty but no less dangerous than the pistols he wears on each hip, while his charge walks past me without a word. He raises a hand and covers the filament, and his omni-tool glows briefly as it shorts and dies. Then he takes two steps back, makes a sweeping gesture while he keys the tool, and the one-way holo of the fourth wall disappears.

With a jerk of his head, he dismisses the two cops inside. Parthus is one of them. He frowns, but makes no complaint as he goes.

My new guest takes the seat across from me, plopping down unceremoniously.

"You comfortable?" he asks.

In answer, I raise my hands onto the table, elbows up.

He stares at my cuffs, and then looks at his guard and nods.

I'm not looking at him, but I hear the warning hesitation in his voice. "Sir—"

He looks at his guard again. Not angry, but forceful. There are no more words. The guard walks over and unlocks my cuffs almost instantly, then steps back by the door.

I rub at the tender hide of my wrists and scratch at my palms. "Don't suppose you could get me a pack of smokes, too?"

He stares at me across the table. Then he looks away and nods once more.

There's another moment of hesitation, but the guard is turian enough not to speak again. He opens the door to leave.

"Silverlight one hundreds," I say loudly before the door closes. I lean forward on my elbows and tilt my head. "Awful nice of you to drop by. Suppose you were in the neighborhood."

"No," he says. "I came as soon as I heard."

"News feeds take a while to get out that far, huh?"

"Apparently."

I rest my cheek on my fist and regard him. He shifts a little in his seat, looking as uncomfortable in civvies as ever. The years have been kinder to him than they have to me, particularly in the vocal department, but the dulling on his plates and the heavier set around his shoulders tells me that the job is starting to take its toll.

"So," I say, raising my free hand in welcome, "what can I do for my primarch?"

He gives me a look. "You know why I'm here."

"I surely don't."

"Sorono."

"Obviously, you're not here to exert your authority. That's favoritism. Conduct unbefitting a good turian leader."

His browplates lower and his mandibles flutter in stern sort of way. "If you really didn't think I'd abuse my power for personal reasons, you don't know me very well," he says dryly.

"No," I reply, drumming my dull talons against the table. "I surely don't."

The door opens and his guard returns, a fresh pack of smokes and an ashtray in his hand. Where he got them this fast, and at this hour, is a mystery. He hands them to me and I begin to strip the plastic off while my guest dismisses him with another firm nod. He leaves without complaint, but I don't have to be a detective to know he's standing right outside.

I've got the cigarette in my mouth before I realize I don't have a light. He reaches across the table and his omni-tool flickers into life, and I grunt a thank you while I light up.

The first drag is always the best. And it's been a long time since my last. I take a moment to savor it, leaning back in my chair and staring up at the ceiling. The primarch waits patiently.

"Thanks for the smokes," I say, giving him a mock salute with the cigarette. "Is that why you came?"

"You look like hell," he says, ignoring me. "They do that to you?"

I chuckle. "Not this time. My jailers have been perfectly civil. You'd know that if you asked them."

"I did. But some of us are better liars than others."

I take another long drag, enjoying the taste and the feel of it in my lungs. "Ain't that the truth."

Another moment of silence passes between us. I flick some ash into the tray. He crosses his arms and says nothing, still staring at me.

"Well?"

"Well, what?" he asks.

"When are you going to ask me what happened?"

"Whenever you felt like answering."

I chuckle again. It's cute how he thinks he's still a cop.

"You've already got all the reports. All the testimonies and data and surveillance camera footage from spirits knows how many sources."

"True."

"So you don't need me." I take out another smoke and press the tip against the ashen burning end of the other, lighting up and disposing of the first in the tray. "Shit, if you're worried about a lie of omission, just ask all my interrogators personally."

He takes a moment to choose his next words carefully. "It's not them I'm worried about."

"Oh, well," I say, blowing smoke purposefully across the table. "That's nice."

The primarch ignores the offense. "Your arresting officer said something strange."

"Did he?"

"He said he found you kneeling over a woman's body."

I don't flinch. Neither does he.

"He said that you were armored, and behaving suspiciously. That's why he cuffed you."

"And?"

"And that you 'seemed upset.' "

I smile humorlessly. "That so?"

He shrugs. "'Seemed very upset,' were his actual words, I believe."

"And why is this strange?" I ask, knowing where this is going.

"It's not, on the face of it."

He waits for me to finish his thought for him. Very cute. Son of a bitch always was better than I ever gave him credit for.

"But."

"Your account doesn't mention a woman."

I smile again, as empty as before. "You know what your problem is?"

"I only have one?"

"Your problem is that you get involved." I rest my hands on the table, smoke billowing gently upwards, and give him a hard look. "You can never let anyone solve anything by themselves. You butt into someone else's business, convinced you can make it right. And you won't let it go. Ever. No matter how much more good it would do, you can never walk away. You wouldn't do it in C-Sec, you wouldn't do it on Omega, and you won't do it now."

He stares at me. Not blankly, but not sternly. His mandibles twitch faintly in an echo of real emotion. Then he looks down at his hands in his lap, sniffs loudly, and leans forward, elbows on the table.

"You know what your problem is?" he asks blandly.

I gesture widely. "By all means."

"Your problem is you don't get involved enough. Every case you ever had, every fight you ever fought, you kept a distance. You never gave up, but you never went out of your way, either. Unless it was expected of you."

"You're not telling me anything I don't already know," I say with a shrug. "I'm a coward."

"No, you're not."

I blink. He leans back in his seat again and points at me.

"That's your problem."

We stare at each other for a bit while I try not to think too hard about what he said. Eventually, I look down and realize my cigarette is about to go out.

I sigh. "What do you want, Garrus?"

"I want the truth, Sor," he says gently.

The ash burns down to the filter. The embers start to die.

"The truth..."

I take a deep breath and stub it out in the ashtray.

"Truth is, I didn't know why I was there at all."

* * *

I should be on a ship on my way back to Illium by now. But there's something I have to do first. I promise my driver that I won't be long.

The park is cold at night, especially this time of year. The sky is clear, and what little snow had accumulated has already melted, leaving the dying red grass and the sinewy trees bare. It's a fitting atmosphere.

There are still people here. A handful, holding a silent vigil a respectful distance away. Most just pay their respects and move on.

The space around the obelisk is filled with it. Candles burning down. Pictures of the dead. Flowers, most of them artificial. Food or drink left in an old tradition. Simple knives in an even older one.

There are no words. No letters, no graffiti. But we've never been a people of words. The memorial is evidence of that, in more ways than one.

I stand before it and look up. Its face is as stark and unblemished as it had been before. Uncaring.

Slowly, I take off my jacket, folding it as best I can with its holes and tatters, and place it at the foot of the monument. I stick my hands in my pockets and shiver.

I look down at the grief and sadness and promises of retribution littering the ground around me. Then I look up at the words at the base, and they stare back in the harsh, angular scripture of old Cipritese.

For Taetran Dead.

I cough out a laugh and walk away without looking back.


End file.
